Writing – Cody Gough (dot com)https://codygough.com
Validating my existence one obscure blog post at a timeSat, 27 Oct 2018 19:45:52 +0000en
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10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Serieshttps://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/
https://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/#commentsMon, 29 Oct 2018 13:00:18 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1701I didn’t watch every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series with my wife just so I could write a bunch of lists about it. We watched the show for fun. We’d watch an episode to decompress and relax after a stressful day dealing with work or healthcare or family or whatever.

We found that this was not always a good idea.

There’s bad television, and then there’s awful television. Unwatchable television. Television that makes you wonder: how did this get made? How is the writer of this episode still employed? Why hasn’t anyone burned/obliterated every existing copy of this in order to save the human race from it?

If you’re watching Star Trek to relax, then skip these episodes. After reading this list, please feel free to cleanse your palate with my previous list of the 10 Most Entertaining Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Whatever you do, DO NOT watch the episodes on this list if you’re looking for “good” Star Trek. You’ve been warned.

Cody — This episode bridges the gap between the lists of best and worst episodes because it firmly belongs in the “it’s so bad, it’s good” category. You know in cheesy black and white sci-fi movies, you can tell they literally put someone’s pet gerbil on a low-budget model of a city with cardboard buildings? Think Plan 9 from Outer Space. That’s this episode.

It is actually a Halloween special. I’m not kidding.

This is the only holiday special of any kind in the history of any Star Trek series. In it, the crew beams down to a planet for no discernible reason, immediately encounters three witches extremely reminiscent of the ones in Macbeth, and ends up in a castle with a giant black cat walking around the hallways. And by “giant cat,” I mean “literally a regular black cat walking around a low-budget set made to look like the catacombs of a castle.” This episode belongs in the “bad” category because it makes absolutely no sense. But this, THIS is campiness in all its glory. There are few, if any, episodes with a more ridiculous premise. But this episode delivers on several other outrageous elements, such as highlights from the series’ usual casual racism against Vulcans (when a perplexed Spock asks, “’Trick or treat,’ captain?” Kirk replies with a dry “Yes, Mister Spock. You’d be a natural.” Because in the future, it’s hilarious to infer that non-humans with pointy ears are Satan! LOL!), some great puns among great quotes, and witches who speak in rhymes. If you take anything in the Star Trek universe seriously, then you will hate this episode. But it’s worth checking out if you want to experience 60s Halloween television in its purest form.

Casey — If there were a book titled Surprising Mistakes that can be Made in the Depths of Uncharted Space, that book should include the following:

KIRK: They tried to tap our conscious mind.
SPOCK: And they missed. They reached basically only the subconscious.

Whoops.

So as I mentioned in a previous post, Star Trek really digs the Freudian stuff—psychoanalysis was actually pretty big in the 60s—and a lot of episodes involve somehow projecting or materializing the characters’ unconscious (or “subconscious”) desires and fears, most of them pretty generic mass culture tropes. This episode constitutes the clunkiest iteration of the your-deepest-darkest-fantasies-made-real plotline. The mystery—which, for the crew as for the audience, is “what the F$%# is going on?!”—is solved when Spock realizes, after narrowly escaping from a fluffy black Mancoon, that the deepest of all unconscious fears, the really primordial terror inscribed into human DNA for millennia, is the fear of… cats.

KIRK: Why a cat?

Reasonable question.

SPOCK: Racial memories. The cat is the most ruthless, most terrifying of animals, as far back as the saber-toothed tiger.

Ah.

In addition to the dubious psychoanalytic-racial theory worthy of McCoy and thus subpar at best for Spock, this episode offers three really unforgettable images. As in, you try to forget them and just can’t.

The first is the aforementioned regular-sized black cat filmed in close-up against what is very obviously a gothic dollhouse. One hopes they spent the money they saved filming this sequence on something useful, like dental work for Scotty, or fixing Chekov’s hair.

The second is the woman (SURPRISE! The black cat was actually a catty dark-haired woman disguised as a cat!) who repeatedly transforms, in an I Dream of Genie poof of pink glitter and xylophone arpeggios, into… the same woman with different clothes and hair. Here is how the scriptwriters describe this transformation:

SYLVIA: You find me beautiful? But I can be many women. (now she’s blonde teen jail-bait) You like what you see. (a platinum blonde in a loose cat-suit) or do you prefer me as I was?

Wince. However, the most cringingly awkward moment, the moment when you’re really just embarrassed for the studio, the actors, and everyone involved, is not the revelation that Kirk has a “blonde teen jail-bait” fantasy (in all fairness to the Captain, the actress continues to look about 38 years old), but rather the moment of truth when the real appearance of the villains is revealed. Bereft of their poorly functioning, misfiring fantasy-stealing-and-projecting devices, bereft of their magic orbs and amulets (a little out of place in a sci-fi series), the assailants assume at last their true form: fuzzy blue beaded bird muppet lobsters.

Photo Source: The A.V. Club

One can only wonder what this image was expected to evoke or recall in the minds of its TV audience.

Cody — There’s a scene in The Godfather Part II where Al Pacino’s character learns about an abortion, and you can see rage building up inside him as if he’s about to murder literally everyone in the world. Just by looking at him, you can feel the raw fury, as powerful as a nuclear explosion, inside him. This is basically how The Omega Glory made me feel. Every time I didn’t think this episode could get any worse, it did. There is so much going on in this episode, it’s almost impossible to completely explain.

First, the good: I will say in this episode’s defense that, at the very least, a lot of time is spent emphasizing the Federation’s Prime Directive of non-interference. Decent world-building there. Moreover, the overall plot involves a somewhat interesting Federation officer they encounter whose motives are clear and whose story arc is scientifically coherent enough to pass as decent science fiction.

But the bad outweighs the good. Let’s start with the premise. Two factions on this planet are feuding: Kohms and Yangs. Yangs are barbarians. Yangs are also all Asian. And they’re named YANGS. I get that the 60s was a different time, but are you telling me there’s no way Star Trek could have been LESS subtly racist than by giving a generic name to a tribe of Asian barbarians? Oh, but it gets worse. There’s a stupid scene in which Captain Kirk is captured and locked away in a cell with a Yang. They agree to a truce after a fight scene, after which Kirk is almost immediately double-crossed, proving that none of the stupid locals on that primitive planet can be trusted! But then. THEN. The ending happens.

Stop reading now if you want to experience the ending yourself, because it is so utterly incomprehensible that I could barely believe it was actually happening. My jaw actually dropped for the duration of the last 10 minutes of this episode. I don’t believe I’ve witnessed a television moment so startlingly incongruent and forced in any show I have ever seen. It truly is the icing on the American Imperialism Cake that this episode turns into. Somehow, for some reason, hundreds of years in the future, Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise literally recites the Pledge of Allegiance. You also discover that the inhabitants of this planet literally worship the United States Constitution. I am screaming as I write this. I have broken three keyboards just trying to finish this paragraph. Casey needs to take over before this episode completely dominates this entire blog post, or somehow results in a house fire. I LITERALLY CAN’T EVEN, as the kids say. This is the Star Wars Holiday Special of all of Star Trek. Nothing in any series of this franchise comes close to how insultingly bad this was. And I’ve read that it was nearly the pilot episode of the series. That’s all I have to say, because my fist is bleeding from punching a wall. Talk to you soon.

Casey — Yeah, it was not a great episode. The religious treatment of the Constitution = highly problematic, as the news reminds us pretty much every other week. However, my memory of it mostly consists of watching Cody hyperventilate on the couch.

Cody — This episode is literally hard to look at. The senior officers of the Enterprise contract a disease that makes them age rapidly, which means they also contract several layers of makeup that God never intended to be seen in high definition. Honestly, Casey hid her eyes for a good portion of this episode. It’s absolutely hideous. There’s nothing else to say about it other than that we both hated it. As he “ages,” Doctor McCoy also speaks with an increasingly southern accent. Because as we all know, a primary symptom of getting older is that you inexplicably develop a southern accent for no reason. This episode is just the worst.

Casey — If David Lynch were to have directed an episode of Star Trek, it would be this one. It’s like Eraserhead if it were just the lizard baby, without the darkly funny parody of bourgeois courtship or the nightmare existence of an eternal and banal domesticity. Or if Dune were just the Baron’s pustules. (Which it basically is.) So disgusting. There are no plots or mysteries or side stories or even Spock quips. Just disgustingness. In HD.

Also, no one could have predicted that as Kirk aged he would also grow quite fat??? Really? Even in Shatner’s heyday one notes the nascent little paunch.

I for one am hashtag grateful that Boston Legal’s Denny Crane looks nothing like the old Kirk of “The Deadly Years.”

Cody — Before the opening credits of this episode, Kirk beams down to a planet and learns that his brother and his wife had both died of a mysterious illness. This is barely referenced at any point in the rest of the episode. Do you understand how bad that is?! There never been any indication at any point in the entire series up to this point that Kirk even had a brother. Suddenly he has one, who gets killed, to ??? effect. The rest of the plot is so forgettable that I don’t even remember what happens. I do know that Kirk’s nephew is introduced, but he spends the entire episode comatose in sick bay, and is never seen again in the rest of the series. I understand continuity wasn’t a strong point for TV shows back in the 60s, but this was egregious. At no point does Kirk care, or are we made to care, about anyone in his family. Missed opportunity.

Casey — Reactions in real time: “Wait Kirk has a brother?! Wait, now he doesn’t anymore?! Oh.” Then 56 minutes of silence.

Cody — This is the episode that never ends… and it goes on and on, my friends… this is the episode that never ends… and it goes on and on, my friends…

I’ll spare you from my overwhelming urge to copy and paste that 8 more times, and instead get down to it: this episode is just too long. The premise is interesting enough to keep you engaged: is Kirk’s memory flawed, or is the ship’s perfect computer system experiencing a problem? Even the finale is somewhat interesting. But most of the episode consists of a court cross-examining Kirk, then going to a commercial, then doing it again, ad nauseam until you would give pretty much anything to watch a few hours of Judge Judy.

I should note that after watching every episode of the show, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed that Star Trek: The Original Series did a good job of never really dragging. The show’s producers and writers did a remarkably good job of keeping each episode relatively interesting for full 50-minute spans… for the most part. But this episode failed where others succeeded. It might have worked as a 22-minute episode, but not as one this long. It was excruciating for Casey.

Casey — It was excruciating for me. And it had potential: a man versus technology dilemma; the officers all get to wear their medals and decorations and fancy dress uniforms (costumes are at least 38% of why one should watch the series); the viewers are given insight into the tedious lackluster bureaucracy of The Federation, thereby helping us to understand why Kirk loves his ship so much and also why so many young men of promise enlist as redshirts, doomed to be zapped away in some fuschia colored rock garden; an unusually sympathetic and smart female character guest stars as the lawyer; and who doesn’t love a good courtroom drama?

Yet few things are worse than a bad courtroom drama, and I mean a really undramatic courtroom drama, like for example a cross-examination that is essentially “Uh uh!” “Nuh uh!” repeated over and over again in various overlit courtrooms. Longest hour of 1967 and 2018.

Cody — Oh, did you want to watch Star Trek? I’m sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a generic 60s detective/cop drama. Seriously, you barely see anyone from the Enterprise in most of the episode. They introduce so many random characters and plotlines and sets that at one point I honestly had to check to make sure we weren’t watching Get Smart or Miami Vice. I distinctly remember about 20 minutes into the episode, I looked at Casey, threw up my arms, and asked “WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?” The plot involves time travel that goes mostly unexplained, and although the moral quandary in the episode is an interesting thought experiment in science fiction, it doesn’t justify an hour-long noir spy thriller that has basically nothing to do with Star Trek. Totally confusing. But it does get bonus points since one of the main characters has a cat named Isis. That made me laugh. (I’m a simple man. Don’t judge.)

Cody and Casey — Nothing about this episode makes ANY sense. Gideon is a utopian planet where nobody gets sick, and nobody seems to ever die in a germ-free world. The problem is that Gideon has become so overpopulated, there’s literally no space or privacy for anyone. We see entire shots of people packed into tight spaces just walking in circles aimlessly to illustrate this. And life is “sacred” to the people of Gideon, so they refuse to entertain the idea of using contraceptives or asking the Federation to help them develop programs to slow down their proliferation of life.

So how does the head of Gideon’s government deal with overpopulation? In the stupidest way ever conceived. He concocts a plan to abduct Captain Kirk, thus risking Gideon’s relationship with the Federation, to steal his blood because he’s a carrier for a virus he overcame in his youth. Then the head of the Gideon Council wants to inject his daughter with this virus so she can spread a plague around her planet, killing millions (or billions). Apparently condoms are bad, but the Black Death doesn’t raise any moral red flags. Also: why wouldn’t they just obtain a vial of germs from somewhere else, or just ASK Captain Kirk if they can have his blood, or find some other random sick person who might be willing to help them, or do literally anything other than kidnap a starship captain, to obtain the virus?

Here’s the other kicker: despite the planet being so overpopulated, the femme fatale of the episode has never been alone in a physical environment in her lifetime, Kirk is abducted and placed on an EMPTY replica of the USS Enterprise that exists on the planet’s surface. So this entire elaborate ruse to get his blood required a massive amount of space, on the surface of a world where vacant space pretty much doesn’t even exist. Every step of this episode is a logical contradiction. It’s like the writers each drafted a page and then passed it to the next person to continue. There is no continuity at all. It is a stupid plot. I will say that Spock has some hilarious lines making fun of politicians in this episode, but other than that, nothing makes a lick of sense.

Cody — “Court Martial” was an episode with never-ending court scenes, and “Plato’s Stepchildren” is an episode with never-ending torture scenes. It’s basically Kirk and company getting shock collared and abused for an hour. It’s a hard episode to watch, because it’s basically just an hour of seeing characters you’ve grown to love humiliate themselves and suffer with no recourse, and it’s just not fun at all.

Now, I should note that this is the episode that many claim to include the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, which sounds great on paper as a progressive moment in TV history. But this was actually the first kiss between a fictional white male and a fictional black female to air on American network television. You can read into the history of the kiss if you want, but long story short, the historical import of this “television moment” is greatly exaggerated. Even if you wanted to believe this was the first televised interracial kiss, though, you’ll be disappointed, because the bad guys in this episode force Kirk and Uhura to kiss against their will, the camera angle is obscured significantly so you can’t really see anything, and the camera CERTAINLY doesn’t linger on the moment. I’d been looking forward to seeing this “historic” TV moment when we started watching the series, but ultimately, it was nothing to write home about, unfortunately. I’m still glad they DID IT, obviously, but don’t get too excited if you decide to see it for yourself, because it’s not as magical as you might have thought. Far from the bold, brave statement you may have been led to believe.

Casey — According to Wikipedia, the BBC did not originally air this episode on the grounds that there was too much torture and sadism in it. Even for the BBC.

It is definitely the most sadistic society the series portrays. The ancient Greek-ish denizens of the unnamed planet are tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed, so intelligent they can move things with their minds, virtually immortal, and have no empathy whatsoever. They are also quite bored—the downside to immortality, I guess. And despite their great mental prowess, they can come up with nothing better to do with their time than torture smaller and weaker beings, usually in the form of cruel little games and spectacles. Within this framework, forcing Kirk and Uhura to kiss as part of one of their malicious little after-dinner spectacles hardly represents any sort of progressive moment in the history of TV; on the contrary, in this context, the interracial kiss is made to appear as some sort of horrific crime against human nature. Both Kirk and Uhura are unwilling to do it. They suffer doing it. Their interracial kiss is framed as a kind of mutual sexual abuse. Really twisted.

Also, is the idea that intelligence and kindness are inversely proportional a sci-fi trope? Or a post-WWII legacy thing? Or what? Because something similar appears, for example, in the movie Gattaca, which also imagines a future of perfected or ideal humans with every quality but empathy and kindness, and whose genetic superiority narrowly ascribes to an obviously Aryan standard of beauty and comportment that is basically nazi in that it rationalizes, on economic, cultural, and “scientific” grounds, the systematic exclusion or mistreatment of “aberrant” beings.

Honestly, this episode isn’t really that bad, or at least, it isn’t bad in the same way that “Catspaw” or “The Mark of Gideon” are bad. It is a little hard to watch, but it is coherent. It raises some interesting points. They travel back in time, kind of. The problem with it is that its flatlined narrative just shows us the twisted logic of a dystopian place like this, over and over, but has no response or profound critique or solution beyond “maybe someone will kill the king and then let’s get the F$%& back to the ship.”

Cody — Here’s what I wrote as my note for this episode: “Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan walk into a bar.” It’s pretty much true. You know how Super Smash Bros. is a super-popular video game franchise, because you get to see popular characters from various unrelated properties you know and love fight each other to see who would win? You know how all the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are insanely popular because they’re constantly crossing over, and The Avengers are always fun to watch because you get to see different superheroes interact? Now imagine that happened in Star Trek, only instead of seeing characters you know or have ever heard of, you “get to see” Kirk and Spock teleported onto a planet along with Abraham Lincoln and a geriatric Vulcan you’ve never heard of so they can fight in a 4-on-4 battle against Genghis Khan, a disgraced Starfleet captain you’ve never heard of, a woman who gets zero lines in the entire episode, and Kahless, the savage father of the Klingon empire who inexplicably takes orders from the Starfleet captain. Why Abraham Lincoln? Why any of this? Why is this happening? What drugs were the writers doing when they came up with this? WHY??

Casey — The only thing more surprising than looking out the window (or whatever it is) of the Enterprise and seeing a giant image of Abraham Lincoln floating in the middle of outer space is looking at this episode’s page on IMDB and learning that it has a 6.8/10. If that does not convey the deeply arbitrary status of aggregate review scores, I don’t know what will.

Unless, that is, we are talking about Cody’s award-winning podcast, Curiosity Daily, which currently has more than 250 five-star reviews on iTunes. Hot.

Cody — Kids make masturbatory hand gestures and then cry about their dead parents. It’s just annoying. There are a handful of episodes that attempt to feature children as the centerpiece of the plot, which I feel like was kind of a “thing” television shows did in the 60s and 70s, perhaps to attract a wider audience of 9-year-olds for some reason. In virtually every attempt at this strange child-pandering approach, Star Trek performed very poorly, but this episode was probably the worst offender. There seriously is nothing to say other than the first sentence of this paragraph, preferably followed by a stiff drink. I suggest whatever Scotty found in his quarters that one time.

Casey — This episode reminds us, along with most horror movies and occasionally Butters from South Park, that few things are creepier than a creepy child. Perhaps its major contribution to TV history is that there is literally no difference between watching this episode and watching a gif of a child lurking in a corner and making masturbatory gestures.

]]>https://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/feed/1black-cat-from-catspawcodygough10 Most Entertaining Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Serieshttps://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/
https://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/#commentsTue, 04 Sep 2018 16:25:24 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1695Welcome to the first list in a 4-item list of lists that my wife and I are writing as a cultural output resulting from the cultural input of watching every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. This, our first list, will be the most banal list, but will still serve as an exceptional point of entry into the show in the event that you haven’t watched it and need to know what’s worth seeing.

The best science fiction is thought-provoking, so in a few weeks, I’ll be posting a list of the most thought-provoking episodes of the show. But this is not that list. While some of these episodes may intrigue you, they were selected for their sheer entertainment value, and not necessarily for their insightfulness or ability to intellectually stimulate their audience. If you’re looking for episodes you can watch for pure enjoyment and share with someone who couldn’t care less about science fiction, then this is the list of episodes for you.

Quick note: you might notice that The Trouble with Tribbles (Season 2, Episode 15) is not on this list, despite being a great episode. I suspect this episode didn’t leap to mind when we were brainstorming our favorite episodes not because it’s undeserving of our accolades, but because it’s the first episode of the show Casey ever watched, so when we last saw it, we hadn’t yet developed parasocial relationships with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. This is kind of ironic, since tribbles were the catalyst to get us to watch the show in the first place, but here we are. I just wanted to point this out before we get into the list. That said, here we go!

Cody — It’s just so good. Aliens take over the Enterprise for like, the hundredth time, and the everyone in the crew is turned into rocks… other than Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty. They learn the aliens have weak senses and emotions, basically meaning they’re bad at being humans. Each crew member then does the most HILARIOUSLY CHARACTER-APPROPRIATE THING POSSIBLE to give the aliens “sensory overload.” Think of the most generic, caricature-like way each crew member could do this, and there’s your episode. Kirk literally seduces one of them. Spock demonstrates supreme logic in a game of 3-D Chess. McCoy does something forgettable, because he’s annoying. And Scotty… oh, Scotty. I have so much to say about Scotty. But Scotty gets the alien drunk. They polish off a bottle of Saurian brandy. It’s the most Scotty thing that has ever happened on the show, and possibly my favorite moment from the entire series. Nothing beats Scotty out-drinking an alien. Nothing.

Casey — One of the great themes of Star Trek is the role of humanity in a totally technologized, computerized environment. Sure, human error is a thing. Hysterical behavior, after all, poses a lot of danger when zipping through the uncharted depths of space at Warp 9. Spock is better than McCoy. These are all facts. Yet our humanity, Star Trek insists, is a greater asset to us than our technology. It will get us out of a pickle when all those nifty handheld gadgets are rendered useless or taken away from us by Superior Life Forms. Of which, it turns out, there are many.

Now, the celebration of an idyllic, abstract and frankly naif humanity might sounds like the kind of “argument” that McCoy likes to spitefully throw in Spock’s “pointy-eared” face. This episode is great because it makes a case for our humanity without idealizing it, instead playing up the simple or absurd side of what it means to be a human–awkward pubescent flirtations, winning a board game, outdrinking someone. The crew’s understanding of their own human foibles allows them to defeat their opponents. And as a narrative the episode is super fun to watch because it resolves the conflict by appealing to the distinct personalities of the main cast. Scotty’s wide-eyed astonishment at the alien’s alcohol tolerance, his agony, his reluctance, and finally his noble sacrifice of his best bottle of Scotch are silly, but they are also just so very Scotty. As Jorge Luis Borges has observed, a great storyteller knows how to make a single moment the cypher of an entire life. In no other episode are Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty (especially Scotty) more fully themselves.

Cody — Apparently Vulcans find themselves “in heat” once in a while, and they have to have sex or die. The opening episode of the show’s second season puts Spock in some serious heat, and you get to see a Vulcan mating ritual. At some point during this, Kirk actually has to fight Spock, which honestly makes pretty much no sense, but the episode somehow makes it work because McCoy actually does something cool for possibly the only time ever at the battle. Spock also delivers a sick burn to his Vulcan bro-bro who steals his would-be mistress: “you’ll find that often, having is not as pleasing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” DAAAAYUM

Casey — This episode, which should have been called “Mate or Die,” addresses a very important question, viz.: Where do baby Vulcans come from? That is to say, given that sex is Nature’s way of tricking us into the uncomfortable and expensive task of bearing, birthing and raising children, how (and why) would totally rational humanoids with no desires or impulses ever end up procreating?

The fact that it even touches on these issues, and that they go to Vulcan, makes this episode one of the most enjoyable to watch. However, as Cody points out, they play fast and lose with narrative coherence. For example, if Vulcans only feel sexual desire during these preordained regulated cycles of lust, why does Spock’s chosen mate T’Pring already have a man picked out? Is everyone on the same lust cycle or do they occur individually and randomly? And how is it that Spock can substitute the would-be mating act, supposedly necessary to his life and moreover only available to him like once a decade, with a sword fight with Kirk (who in turn gets an injection from McCoy)? What does that say about their relationship?

I also very much enjoyed that the title of supreme leader of Vulcan, the Universe’s Most Rational Civilization, is held by the imposing matriarch T’Pau. She is “the only person to turn down a seat at the Federation Council” and thus anti-establishment and thus cool. Kirk’s admiration for her reifies his Maverick status and sets him apart from the soldier follows orders, which is another important element of this episode since he is disobeying orders by going to Vulcan at all. There is lots to say about gender and sexuality in Star Trek, but basically, as a 60s TV show, it tends to reflect contemporary anxieties about changing gender roles by idealizing the female sex slave, casting the working woman as an irrational nuisance unless her job is to tend to the immediate needs of a man, or, Yoko Ono style, as a threat to the camaraderie of the band of brothers. T’Pau is a refreshing exception.

Cody — What would happen if, at the height of the Roman Empire, television had been around? This is that episode. You get a mashup of gladiatorial combat and reality television, and it’s done ridiculously well. This episode could go into our list of top thought-provoking episodes because it’s such a cool concept. But just watching the fight scenes is fun. And THE ENDING. OMG THE ENDING. Let’s just say the planet finds salvation by finding Jesus. I’m not even kidding. It comes basically out of nowhere, and in the form of one of Uhura’s four-ish relevant lines of dialogue in the entire series. Apparently monotheism was pretty popular in the 1960s. Thanks, television history!

Casey — They don’t worship the Sun…they worship the Son! Get it?

If you don’t, don’t feel bad, because only Lt. Uhura did.

Even though this episode opens and closes with the idea that religions evolve through a complex process of puns, the story somehow works. By allowing television and Ancient Rome to coexist, it asks the viewer to reflect on the idea of uneven modernizations — a reality in many parts of our world — as well as on our Society of the Spectacle.

Or the viewer can disregard all of that and just enjoy Spock and Co. resolving everything while Kirk passes the last night before his execution with his ideal woman, a platinum blonde submissive — “This evening I was told I was your slave. Command me” — because these are Kirk’s problems and also because sword fights aren’t the only kinds of fantasies people like to live through the screen now that they’re not quite so acceptable in real life.

I for one enjoy anything that suggests parallels between the U.S. and the late Roman Empire, whether it be overstepping its boundaries, corruption through the lavish excesses of the upper classes, the rise of insane leaders, a politics based entirely upon spectacle, or American Gladiators.

Cody — This might be Casey’s favorite episode. You meet Spock’s parents. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? On top of that, the episode is basically a murder mystery dinner, only with ridiculously stupid looking aliens and Vulcans saying funny things with a humor that’s so dry, you think you’ve wandered into the Sahara Desert with cottonmouth from a hangover. The last scene in the episode is literally a room full of men guffawing about how women are illogical, so if that’s not your jam, then you might want to cut out early. But otherwise it’s all-around gold.

Casey — This is absolutely my favorite episode. Spock’s Vulcan father, his human mother, their relationship with their son Spock, and their relationship with each other unfold and develop against a background of a Psychedelic Agatha Christie whodunit populated by high maintenance foreign officials that vaguely resemble Teletubbies. So many great 1960s alien costumes. So many.

The episode also features one of the series’s more subtle and artfully crafted character scenes: Spock and McCoy await in full dress uniform to receive the Vulcan Ambassador. McCoy tries the Vulcan hand salute thing and of course he can’t do it and so he bitches about it. Meanwhile Kirk strides ahead and greets the ambassador as he descends from the space pod thing and of course he (Kirk) is super cordial and smooth and adept at playing the diplomat and he doesn’t even try the Vulcan hand salute, so we don’t know whether or not he can do it and he probably can’t and that’s probably why he didn’t but he still pulls off a regular greeting without being rude because he is suave and charming and cordial but not a sycophant; because, in short, he is Kirk. The Vulcan Ambassador ignores Spock. He introduces “She who is my wife,” a smiley human wearing a bonnet. The Ambassador asks to be escorted to his quarters by someone who is not Spock. Kirk and McCoy are taken aback. They are perplexed. Nonplussed. Kirk then asks if Spock wants to go down to Vulcan to visit his parents. And Spock informs that the Ambassador and his wife are his parents!

Will Spock’s family ever be reconciled? Will the killer be found and brought to justice? What is it like for a human woman being married to an emotionless Vulcan man? Find out the easy way by watching this episode.

Cody — I like this episode because it sets up one of the most interesting recurring character interactions in the series. This is one of those “everyone in the cast goes crazy” episodes that you find in other TV shows (or at least in the follow-up episode The Naked Now from Star Trek: The Next Generation), but in this one, Nurse Chapel tells Spock that she has feelings for him. And amazingly, this is referenced in future episodes. Not normal for the series. Kirk literally finds out his brother died in the opening scene of another episode, and it’s never mentioned again, including at any other point IN THAT EPISODE. Continuity is not a strong point of the series. So aside from seeing everybody basically drunk and getting to watch Sulu swashbuckling with a sword, it’s actually an episode that kind of “matters” in the series, which is cool.

Casey — This is one of Star Trek’s many forays into the realm of the crew’s unconscious. For the show’s main cast, breaking character is part of playing the character. Episodes like this shed light on all the naughty desires that seethe beneath those chartreuse, ruby and baby blue uniforms. Star Trek is no Hitchcock film, but for a TV show it is very good at delivering an action-packed narrative while also tapping into the murkier dimensions of the human psyche. I think this is part of what makes this show still so watchable and enjoyable today: sure, they are wholesome characters, their integrity and loyalty to their mission is unquestionable, but because you get regular enough glimpses of all their repressed fantasies, they manage to stay believable, or at least sympathetic.

Cody — Overall, after watching this series, I was a little disappointed in how few clever or interesting ways the crew came up with to get out of trouble/danger. A lot of times they would do something generic like shoot a phaser at something, or aliens would do something inexplicable and you’d just kind of shrug and go “okay, cool, I guess they didn’t blow up after all?” or something. In this episode, however, Kirk does something cool to outsmart the aliens. I found that satisfying enough. But then. THEN. THEN you see the alien. They beam over, and oh my God. What is happening. Surrealism goes from zero to sixty in about three seconds. The ending is super weird and super unexpected and you’re just like “SOMEONE PASS ME MY VAPE PEN” or whatever so you can rewind the episode 15 minutes and watch it again. My notes on this episode read “Sultan baby, good tactics.” Enough said.

Cody — You know how I said there weren’t enough clever tricks in this series? This episode has another one. Kirk explaining Fizzbin is one of the best scenes in the series. But I should probably back up and explain that the entire premise of the episode is that Kirk and Spock land on a planet with a super advanced race of aliens who somehow decide to copy every aspect of 1920s gangster culture. Casey had a running theory that Star Trek was so low budget when they shot it, the premise of most of the episodes was determined entirely by which TV set was “next door” that they could use for an episode. Apparently in this case, Star Trek was shooting next door to a gangster movie, so here we are. There are some BAD accents in this. I live in Chicago, and I’ve heard some bad/unrealistic Chicago accents, but this was brutal. That made it all the more entertaining, though. It’s just stupid entertainment, but definitely good enough to be enjoyable.

Casey — Just when you start to suspect that Captain James T. Kirk is an oily womanizer whose primary function is to constantly be rescued by his crew, this episode reminds you why Kirk is (as Cody tells me) TV’s most iconic hero.

If Star Trek is something of an Odyssey story — a ship sailing from island to island, confronting monsters and perils of a natural and supernatural order — then nowhere does Kirk show himself more of a “deep, devious, subtle, and many-sided Odysseus” (Homer’s adjectives, not mine) than he does in the Fizzbin scene. Even Spock barely keeps up, though his dry bemusement at the Captain’s lies — something Vulcans can’t do — contributes significantly to the scene’s comic effect. The Fizzbin scene is to Kirk what the Cyclops chapter is to Odysseus.

Cody — We’re not sure if this was a 1960s thing or a Star Trek trope, but a lot of episodes in the original series express some sort of anxiety about evil twins or evil doubles or alternate parallel versions of ourselves. Maybe it was some Cold War thing, or maybe not. But this was the most entertaining episode to actually watch play out. You get an evil but still totally logical Spock, and you get a believable romance with Kirk for possibly the only time ever, and it all just really works. Good Enterprise, meet evil Enterprise, and you’re off to the races. Nothing particularly insightful to say about it other than that it’s much better done than a lot of the other episodes that play with a duality theme.

Casey — The trope of the double, whether as replica, mirror image, or evil twin, taps into a lot of fears and goes way, way back: rivals must be roughly equal or there is no rivalry. In a lot of Romantic literature (Poe, Hoffman, early Dostoevsky, etc.), seeing your own double is never a good thing. In fact it usually means you are going to die. More generally, fakes and forgeries — the double that hides or supplants the authentic original — express our concern about being tricked, mislead or manipulated. I imagine that during the Cold War era in which the series first aired, propaganda images of a Communist Double of America with communist versions of everything and everyone you knew put a pretty scary spin on the double trope for a lot of people.

However, in this episode, the Double is more of an Exotic Other. It is Orientalized, in the Edward Said sense of the term, expressing a centuries-old colonialist “We the Civilized West” versus “Them the Barbaric Far East” thing. Perhaps Star Trek gravitates more to those kinds of cultural fantasies than it does to Cold War fears because they are more comfortable. They are certainly more erotic: the “Captain’s Woman,” whom I would consider the prettiest actress ever to appear on Star Trek, is straight out of an Arabian Nights harem, and other-Uhura’s belly-baring belly-dancer red uniform sure out sexifies Red Army uniforms and icons of Lenin and Stalin.

On a narrative level, this episode is interesting because it shows you what an evil Kirk or Spock would be like and they’re actually not that different; they’re just evil. This means that goodness is not their characters’ defining trait, it means they have qualities that transcend the rather flat categories of good versus evil , and so basically, once again, it speaks again to the particularity of these characters. They can be so many alternative versions of themselves and yet still, somehow, in each variant they are still so totally them.

Cody — This is higher on my list than it is on Casey’s list, possibly in part because I really bought into the Spock romance angle. Something about this episode just kinda worked for me, though. On an alien world, Spock and McCoy are hurled back in time to an ice age, and Kirk is pitched back to the middle of some weird religious inquisition. The intriguing and entertaining part is definitely all Spock here, even if the premise literally makes zero sense (he “de-evolves” to a primitive Vulcan because of the time period they arrive in, which is stupid and, dare I say, illogical). But his romance is well-written and well-directed (and well-performed, obviously). This isn’t a magical episode of television by any means, but I was into it.

In this episode, Borges’s “Library of Babel” meets time travel meets state-sponsored terror meets leather bikinis. Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive to planet that is about to be engulfed by a supernova. The planet has a library which contains a vast archive of videos that are actually portals to the past. The archive is cared for by a single, aged, homicidal librarian and his identical replicas, all of whom are remarkably strong and agile and homicidal for their age. Much as contemporaneous dictatorships were doing, this librarian has made certain people “disappear,” not by killing them and hiding their bodies but by exiling them to remote place in time from which they can never return.

Cody — Full disclosure: we added this to our list of best episodes before we’d even seen it. I mean, Harry Mudd is a fun character. His first appearance is entertaining but pretty generic, but this one is so over the top, you can’t help but enjoy it even more. Mudd’s personal hell is — are you ready for some progressive television? — his nagging wife, so of course that’s a recurring theme in the episode. The rest of the episode plays with notions of utopia, which is another very common theme in the series. What I like about this approach, though, is that it delves into reactance, which I think isn’t explored nearly enough as it should be. Not to mention this episode includes the unforgettably amazing scene where the senior officers of the Enterprise basically do bad improv to confuse robots. Yes, that’s as awesome as it sounds.

Casey — There could be a whole separate category devoted to Star Trek episodes about replicas. In this one, Mudd somehow becomes the leader/captive of an extremely intelligent (?) Android race and immediately proceeds to commission a series of Barbie Doll replicas whose function is to pour him wine in the pink cave that serves him as a throne room and that includes an aquarium for the replica or taxidermied body (?) of his wife, whom he now can turn on and off at will, to his infinite delight.

All of this is but an elaborate and ultimately unnecessary frame for the Enterprise crew’s victory via some impromptu Theatre of the Absurd, suggesting that avant-garde art is capable of dethroning tyrants, baffling technocrats, short-circuiting basic bitches, and dismantling an oppressive hegemonic system. This is my fantasy too, Star Trek. This is my fantasy too.

]]>https://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/feed/2star-trick-photo-credit-brett-jordan-via-flickr-attribution-2-generic-cc-by-2-0-licensecodygoughI just watched every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, and there’s a lot to sayhttps://codygough.com/2018/08/28/i-just-watched-every-episode-of-star-trek-the-original-series-and-theres-a-lot-to-say-cody-gough/
https://codygough.com/2018/08/28/i-just-watched-every-episode-of-star-trek-the-original-series-and-theres-a-lot-to-say-cody-gough/#commentsTue, 28 Aug 2018 12:30:32 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1678About 9 months ago, my wife and I started watching Star Trek on Netflix. As in, the ORIGINAL Star Trek. The Kirk and Spock one. Known as “TOS” for “The Original Series,” at least among circles of people who spend their time defining acronyms to help them more clearly talk about TV shows, this show is in the cultural fabric of America. Kirk and Spock are two of the most iconic characters in television history (source: my opinion).

But have you ever gone back and actually watched it?

I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I proudly picked up my first edition copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia — a physical copy, before e-books were a thing — when I was in second grade. I also dabbled in Deep Space 9, Voyager, and even Enterprise over the years. Yet TOS was never part of my repertoire.

So I decided, after more than a decade of mostly Star Trek-free living, that it was time to see what Kirk and Spock had done to become such important reference points for people around the world. And by “I decided,” I mean “tribbles were literally thrown at us during a toast at our wedding reception, and I figured I should probably show Casey ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ so she knows WTF had happened on our wedding day.”

In true Cody and Casey fashion, I showed her one episode, thinking “this will give her an idea of what this show is like,” and was then surprised by a response of “this is amazing and we are watching another episode right now.” This has happened with a bizarre lineup of shows, including but not limited to Game of Thrones, Akibaranger (a Japanese parody of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, effectively… you can imagine my surprise), and now Star Trek.

About halfway through the series, which we were watching for actual entertainment value more than to get a sense of having completed something, Casey proposed that we make a Top 10 and Bottom 10 episodes list. I vaguely kept this in mind as we watched, but really, we weren’t viewing the show as a means to an end. And I think that’s an important distinction to make. So many people these days literally only consume something or come up with ideas so they can “generate content” or whatever garbage buzzword is popular that day. But we embarked on this journey for ourselves, and only occasionally noted along the way that “this might be a top/bottom episode.” So that’s how we got here.

We wrapped up the series by watching the pilot episode, “The Cage,” which seemed to me like a good way to end. Might as well look at what could have been, right? Then I made some coffee, Casey made some yerba mate, and we sat down to review the descriptions and Netflix thumbnails of each episode in order to make our lists of the best and worst episodes.

The “best episodes” list was 26 episodes long. Basically a third of the series.

So we did some refining. What did “best” mean, exactly? Most entertaining? Most thought-provoking? We quickly found we could easily split these into two separate lists. We also started an entirely separate list that I expertly called “interesting but something f***ing weird happens and it’s like, what do I even do with this?” Once you see that list, you’ll understand why it exists. Like, what do you do when an episode provokes thought about utopian ideals, but you’re cringing throughout the entire episode because Dr. McCoy uses this bizarre southern accent for some reason and a woman from the crew becomes a damsel in distress who gets dressed up like a princess? And that’s the mildest example on the list.

We ended up with FOUR lists, which contain more than half the episodes in the series. But I think they’re good lists. We’ll be posting one of these four Top 10 lists every week for the next 4 weeks.

First will be the Top 10 Most Entertaining Episodes. This is the best place to start because it gets the fun stuff out of the way, not to mention there are probably literally like 80 million lists exactly like this from other people, so at this point it’s pretty tired out. I’m too lazy to do a Google search to confirm any of what I just said, so deal with it. When we say “entertaining” we just mean “fun to watch.” These episodes are not necessarily deep or thought-provoking.

Then we’ll drop straight to the Top 10 Worst Episodes. These are just un-watchably bad. Avoid them at all costs.

At that point, we’ll head over to the Top 10 episodes with good or interesting ideas that ultimately do something so weird, we can’t exactly recommend them in good conscience. The intro to that list is going to be detailed and hilarious, so just trust me when I tell you to look forward to that one. And no, I am not going to initial-cap the stupid title of this list. I’m already over it.

We’ll wrap up with the Top 10 Thought-Provoking Episodes of the show, and this is where being married to someone with a PhD in Comparative Literature is REALLY going to show through. Just kidding, it’s going to show through in every list. But I think/hope this one will be the most useful for true fans of science fiction as a genre of possibilities, and not just a pew pew laser beam fest of mindless entertainment.

We’ll wrap up with a final week discussing some of our thoughts on important elements of the series, like how awesome Scotty is, how Russian Chekov is, and how we feel about Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (spoiler alert: it’s strongly). We’ll also explain why Spock is basically the best character in television history and delve into some of the mystery of William Shatner, who I see on Twitter and who Casey has seen on Boston Legal, which means we have two very different reference points for the legendary eclectic actor. My biggest regret is that we didn’t take notes on the outrageous outfits worn by the lead ladies in each episode, if for no other reason than because Casey actually liked some of them, and I need reference material for Halloween costumes.

Oh, and once all is said and done, we may have a special post on the Star Trek movies, as well. As of right now, Casey has only seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and I haven’t seen most of the other films in many years. Hopefully that’ll be a treat.

So there’s your preview! Look for upcoming lists in the coming weeks. I’ll update this post with links to all upcoming posts I referenced, as they become available. Until then: live long and prosper! Mostly because you can’t click on my links if you’re DEAD. HA HA

]]>https://codygough.com/2018/08/28/i-just-watched-every-episode-of-star-trek-the-original-series-and-theres-a-lot-to-say-cody-gough/feed/5star-trek-the-original-series-communicator-photo-credit-cody-goughcodygoughAmericans: take the high road or burn America to the ground?https://codygough.com/2016/11/09/americans-take-high-road-burn-america-to-the-ground/
https://codygough.com/2016/11/09/americans-take-high-road-burn-america-to-the-ground/#commentsWed, 09 Nov 2016 18:37:24 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1564Following the 2016 presidential election, the vitriol is palpable.

The morning and early afternoon after Election Day, top Twitter trends included #NotMyPresident, #StillWithHer, AmeriKKKa [sic], #CalExit, and #TwitterBlackout (Twitter users are changing their profile layouts to plain black images and headers in protest of election results). Friends, co-workers, and public transit passengers in Chicago are openly talking about how “Americans are stupid” and “we live in a country full of terrible people.” I’ve walked by multiple women crying.

I get it: a lot of people hate Trump. I don’t need to recap why because you already know why, unless you’ve been living under a rock. And I’m not going to spend half this post condemning or defending him. But roughly half of our country voted for him. This is the country we live in: “one nation, (under God), indivisible.” It’s reality. It’s happening. As Millennials would say: President-elect Trump is a thing.

It must be noted, of course, that not everyone is reacting quite as dramatically as those mentioned above. But when one looks around and sees all of these extreme reactions, it brings to mind a question, in all seriousness: are we going to war?

The country is divided, and the way I see it, we have two options:

Try to understand why Trump won. Listen to what conservative and independent voters have to say. Keep an open mind. Learn how to communicate with others in a healthy way that might convince them to think differently. Understand that Trump is a symptom of larger problems that extend beyond racism and misogyny, such as massive wealth inequality and economic policies that many Americans view as insufficient, and empathize with your fellow countrymen who are hurting. Come up with new policy ideas based on collaboration and compromise. Sympathize with people who are experiencing hardships and see how you can help, and help them understand how progressive policies supported by the Democratic party could help.

Refuse to accept President Trump. Express constant outrage on social media. Insist that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a xenophobic, misogynistic white supremacist. Call everyone who voted for Donald Trump stupid. Encourage your political representatives to obstruct the government the same way Republicans obstructed President Obama for the last 8 years. Refuse to accept any policies put forth by the GOP, including the approval of any federal budget. Obstruct the government. Fight each other. De-humanize all conservatives, demean their values, other-ize rural Americans, and burn this mother to the ground.

Am I the only person who prefers option 1?

This morning, President Obama said it eloquently:

“We have to remember that we’re all actually one team… we aren’t Democrats first. We aren’t Republicans first. We’re Americans first. We all want what’s best for this country.”

“That’s what the country needs: a sense of unity. A sense of inclusion. A respect for our institutions… and respect for each other.”

I don’t see much respect online, and I don’t see everyone I encounter presenting themselves with dignity or respecting “the other side.” I think the reason everyone has hated the 2016 election so much is the increasing lack of respect for anyone’s point of view. Over the last year, social media contorted into an echo chamber of extreme views, and anyone presenting a moderate or contrary opinion violating the status quo was digitally crucified. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both did a lot of things during the campaign season that angered people, but in my view, the real anger this year came from the lack of humanity shown by voters and their friends and families.

So now the question becomes: will all Americans join their sophisticated peers and take the high road towards unity and mutual understanding, or will the most outspoken and outraged voices drag down the left and damage the integrity of our democracy? Time will tell. But it would be ironic if the vocal Americans calling half of our country stupid, ignorant, and racist turned out to be the ones who bring down one of the most successful governments in history by refusing to listen to the diverse points of view that many claim are so fundamentally important to our nation’s success.

And if Obama’s words aren’t enough to convince you, then it may be worth recalling one of the official slogans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, “Love Trumps Hate.” Her concession speech reflected this sentiment:

“I believe we are stronger together and we will go forward together. And you should never, ever regret fighting for that. You know, scripture tells us, let us not grow weary of doing good, for in good season we shall reap. My friends, let us have faith in each other, let us not grow weary and lose heart, for there are more seasons to come and there is more work to do.”

My fellow Americans, I implore you: let’s lead by example and let’s prove how indivisible we really are.

]]>https://codygough.com/2016/11/09/americans-take-high-road-burn-america-to-the-ground/feed/1american-flag-photo-credit-ayblazermancodygoughIn this election, issues matter more than labels (or at least they should)https://codygough.com/2016/02/04/in-this-election-issues-matter-more-than-labels-or-at-least-they-should/
https://codygough.com/2016/02/04/in-this-election-issues-matter-more-than-labels-or-at-least-they-should/#commentsThu, 04 Feb 2016 14:00:44 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1475The worst moment of the entire 2016 presidential campaign was when Bernie Sanders said the phrase “democratic socialist.”

Why? Because since last summer, it seems like every online discussion regarding the election has involved slapping a label on an issue or policy and then spiraling into a fruitless debate about its precise application or meaning. And I blame the word “socialist.”

My problem is that while these labels may make it easy to conveniently categorize something, they also deliberately distract from the actual thinking or reasoning behind an idea.

For example: I do not care whether our police and fire departments are socialist, communist, Marxist, Klingon, whatever—I just know that fire departments are a good thing for me to have in my life. Here’s how fire departments work: I pay taxes, and if my house is engulfed in flames, then I can dial 9-1-1 and someone will drive to my house and try to extinguish the fire. It’s a system that I am fine with. I literally do not care what label you put on that system, because that system is beneficial to me. You could tell me that the concept of the municipal fire department is Satanic, and I’d still support it as long as it would decrease the probability of all my physical possessions being incinerated in a raging inferno.

So, are some ideas socialist? Maybe. But might one of those ideas also be a good idea? Yes. And that should always be the question.

None. Of. This. Matters. At the end of the day, issues are more important than labels.

Bernie Sanders wants to change a lot of things. He supports universal healthcare, free college tuition for public colleges and universities, and a $15 minimum wage, and wants to change the fact that ninety-nine percent of all new income generated today goes to the top 1 percent of people in this country. When Americans—both Democrat and Republican—hear Bernie Sanders discuss these issues, perhaps they shouldn’t react simply by screaming “socialist!” or saying “to much IF”S, because LABELS” before immediately dismissing his ideas. Maybe Americans should look at each of the issues being discussed by Bernie Sanders and other candidates on both sides of the aisle and ask themselves “is that a thing that should be changed?” And then they should figure out whether they agree with the means by which a candidate wants to bring about that change.

Many voters have expressed concerns about the difficulty of finding funding for Bernie Sanders’ proposed programs, and those are perfectly legitimate concerns. But simply decrying the ideas “because LABELS” is asinine.

“But Cody,” you might be saying right now, as your anticipation at writing me a scathing comment pointing out my astonishing stupidity makes your loins tingle, “socialism / communism / Marxism has destroyed every country that has ever had anything to do with it and policies that fit under one label are all evil and a gateway drug to fascism and dictators and we’ll turn into Cuba and everyone will be poor and the water of the Mississippi will turn into red blood and swarms of locusts will consume us all!” While you have an excellent point, that is still not quite as valid of an argument as asking “how do we pay for all this?”

(And by the way: I have had enough of the insistence that socialism—or any other “ism,” for that matter—has wrought destruction and misery on every nation in the world that adopted any socialist policies ever. Policies do not exist within a vacuum. Some socialist countries are also democratic and some are totalitarian, and there is a massive difference. There are a lot of moving parts within nations and within politics. Even if all of Bernie Sanders’ proposals magically passed within the next year—which even I realize won’t happen—it still would not make the United States a socialist country in which every single policy and ideology perfectly matched any other socialist country that has ever existed. Hitler is credited with the first public anti-smoking campaign. Americans run anti-smoking campaigns. Does that mean we’re all Nazis?)

Ideologies do matter. But they are not the only thing. We just need to understand them, and know when they’re being used to manipulate or deceive or avoid independent thinking.

A quick online search on semantics in this election netted me an 1,141 word article about Bernie’s identity as a democratic socialist. I read the article, and by the time I had finished, one thing was perfectly clear to me: both the author and I had completely wasted time and thought on a mental onanism of semantic nonsense.

My purpose in writing this post is that I hope voters and political commentators alike will stop this never-ending mutual masturbation of a debate about semantics. There is nothing to be gained. Look at a policy proposal, and if you think it could benefit you or your fellow Americans, then support it. Period.

]]>https://codygough.com/2016/02/04/in-this-election-issues-matter-more-than-labels-or-at-least-they-should/feed/7socialism-anchorman-steve-carell-memecodygoughaward-you-no-points-comment-thread-billy-madison-memeThe worst reason not to vote for Bernie Sandershttps://codygough.com/2016/01/31/the-worst-reason-not-to-vote-for-bernie-sanders/
https://codygough.com/2016/01/31/the-worst-reason-not-to-vote-for-bernie-sanders/#commentsSun, 31 Jan 2016 15:00:41 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1481When did citizens of the United States adopt a defeatist attitude?

For months now, I have read time after time that if elected president, Bernie Sanders “won’t be able to get anything done,” and that his policies will “never be passed” because of Republican opposition.

But what does it say about the United States if its citizens are afraid to vote for a candidate because they don’t believe their government will allow the leader of the free world to address the biggest domestic problems it faces? Moreover: what does it say about us?

May 5, 1970: Thousands of University of Washington students occupying and blocking Intersate Highway 5 (I-5) and facing state troopers in riot gear as they protested the killings at Kent State Universtiy and the invasion of Cambodia. Photo, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle.

Many Americans grew up hearing about heroic protests. Hundreds of thousands died fighting for their vision of the United States in the Revolutionary War and in the Civil War. The African-American Civil Rights Movement saw boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and other forms of protest (including Bernie Sanders’ arrest while protesting segregated schools in Chicago). And tens of thousands of citizens demonstrated their opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of ourselves—as individuals and as a nation—than freedom, and we have always been shaped by our battle for it. Millions of Americans have marched, fought, and even died for their beliefs and principles.

But based on the aforementioned argument against voting for Bernie Sanders, many people believe we shouldn’t elect him to be our next president because… his policies might be blocked by other elected officials?

…officials elected to represent the best interests of the American people?

Nobody is asking you to pick up a musket and march onto a field and risk being shot and killed among thousands of other Americans. Nobody is asking you to take time off work or quit your job so you can go march in freezing cold weather, or walk to work for 381 days. Nobody is asking you to clash with police officers and risk being shot. Bernie Sanders is simply asking you to register to vote, and then vote. It’s not hard to fight for your beliefs in 2016.

When did Americans stop standing up for themselves to tremble in fear of a bunch of old people in business suits?

The clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther KIng (3rd from left) and other black and white civil right leaders march 28 August 1963 on the Mall in Washington DC during the “March on Washington”.

Our government could easily pass legislation to alleviate the hardships faced by millions of Americans. To begin that process, all we must do is elect officials with the courage to do so. And as one of those officials, Bernie Sanders has shown consistently for decades that he stands for the fundamental principles of freedom and will stop at nothing to help all Americans attain a higher quality of life.

I know a lot of us are comfortable. The internet is great. Television is great. Fast food is great. We have new Star Wars films. What could be better, right?

But if you take a close look, you can see a darkness under the light of day-to-day living. And the status quo is not going to change that. Our forefathers did not stand by and say “legislators will abolish slavery some day”—they fought for it. Our parents and grandparents did not sit at home during the Vietnam War while their brothers and sisters were dying and say “eventually our politicians will get us out of there”—they protested. People like Bernie Sanders did not idly watch as his fellow countrymen were mistreated and say “maybe some day our country will be less segregated”—they stood up for what was right.

So do not tell me with a straight face “I agree with Bernie Sanders’ ideas, but I won’t vote for him because Hillary Clinton is a more ‘realistic’ candidate who can slowly enact change.” That is a surrender, and that is not the way of this great country that I’ve learned about for my entire life.

I completely understand that not everyone agrees with Bernie’s policies, and I can respect many reasons for voting for another candidate. Do you disagree with Bernie’s policies? Fine, then don’t vote for him. Do you disagree with his voting record? Fine, then don’t vote for him. But don’t you dare cast a halfhearted vote for someone else just because you’re worried he’ll lose a fight, because that’s not in the spirit of this country. At all.

And on a final note: don’t give me the argument that I’m “naive” or that I don’t understand how politics work. I’m not stupid. I get it. It will be a fight. But I’d rather fight and lose than roll over and accept failure. And I hope that you’ll confront your pessimism and mistrust of the system and take a bold step to fight with me.

We are the citizens of the United States of America, and this is our country. We are blessed with the privilege of being able to write our own history. And the time to do it is now.

]]>https://codygough.com/2016/01/31/the-worst-reason-not-to-vote-for-bernie-sanders/feed/24kent-state-protestcodygoughMay 5, 1970: Thousands of University of Washington students occupying and blocking Intersate Highway 5 (I-5) and facing state troopers in riot gear as they protested the killings at Kent State Universtiy and the invasion of Cambodia. Photo, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle.The clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther KIng (3rd from left) and other black and white civil right leaders march 28 August 1963 on the Mall in Washington DC during the "March on Washington".I support Bernie Sanders, and I’m not stupid or unrealistichttps://codygough.com/2016/01/27/i-support-bernie-sanders-and-im-not-stupid-or-unrealistic/
https://codygough.com/2016/01/27/i-support-bernie-sanders-and-im-not-stupid-or-unrealistic/#commentsWed, 27 Jan 2016 18:46:13 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1455Today I read for maybe the 10,000th time an assertion that supporters of Bernie Sanders are unrealistic, that Bernie Sanders supporters will all be disappointed if they elect him because he won’t be able to bring the change he’s promising, that Bernie Sanders’ policies will be “just another example of Democrats making promises they can’t keep,” and so on and so forth. And I’d like to briefly dispel a misconception about people who support Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States:

We’re not stupid.

I have a college education and a good job, and I’m guessing I’m not the only Sanders supporter who does. Now, this doesn’t necessarily make me smart, but it is at least an indicator of having achieved some level of learning that would indicate that I’m capable of coherent and independent thought.

And guess what? I don’t expect any of Bernie Sanders’ major proposals to take effect in the next 2, 3, or possibly even 4 years. I don’t support Bernie Sanders simply because I think he’ll magically overturn Citizens United, fix our indisputably broken campaign finance system, legalize marijuana, eliminate privately owned prisons, pass a single-payer healthcare system, crack down on Wall Street, or pass most of his other proposals within his first year of office.

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: I, like presumably most Americans who support Bernie Sanders, do not expect miracles.

What I do expect, by electing Bernie Sanders, is to have an honest president whom Americans can trust at all times to be completely sincere, and who will work as hard as he can to represent the interests of the American people. By electing Bernie Sanders, I expect that the leader of our country will actually represent me and not just major corporations who are cutting him big checks. And no, I don’t get the sense that Hillary Clinton possesses any of those qualities. Decidedly.

And you know what? Maybe the “political revolution” Bernie Sanders keeps talking about won’t happen. Maybe electing Bernie Sanders will put him in office for 4 years, nothing productive will happen, and once his term is over, we’ll be back to “politics as usual” and huge corporations like Comcast and pharmaceutical and insurance companies and huge financial institutions will go right back to doing whatever they want because hey, they run things and they have money, so who’s going to stop them, right?

But if Bernie Sanders is elected president, then maybe, just maybe, things will change. And that’s worth a vote. That’s worth trying.

(Not to mention: the Affordable Care Act was never “supposed” to make it, and remember what happened there? Also worth noting that Bernie Sanders helped write it. Implementation has been far from perfect, but he still got it passed.)

And if Bernie Sanders is elected president and this whole “political revolution” thing we all keep talking about actually does happen, then think of the possibilities. We are at a point in our history when we, as citizens this country, can legitimately make the United States of America the indisputable greatest country on earth. We have the rare opportunity to lead the world by example in showing what a government can do when it isn’t corrupt and solely focused on making a handful of individuals disproportionately wealthy.

THAT is what I’m voting for. I’m voting for the hope, the possibility, that things will change—realistically, over time. And electing Bernie Sanders will send a clear message—to corporations, to the media, to our current elected officials, and to anyone progressive who’s thinking about running for office but doesn’t believe in getting support—that enough is enough, and that it’s time to start listening to the public and not just to a board room full of campaign donors.

Electing Bernie Sanders is pushing a snowball off the top of a mountain and seeing how far it will roll.

So stop assuming that Bernie Sanders supporters are unrealistic or stupid, because we’re not. Call us hopeful, call us idealists, call us optimists, but don’t call us unrealistic or stupid. And stop underestimating us.

As a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I fully recognize that this whole “political revolution” thing is not a guarantee. But right now, the opportunity to start one is a whole lot more appealing to me than the status quo.

]]>https://codygough.com/2016/01/27/i-support-bernie-sanders-and-im-not-stupid-or-unrealistic/feed/632bernie-sanders-change-will-not-take-place-without-political-participationcodygoughbernie-sanders-change-will-not-take-place-without-political-participationjon-stewart-daily-show-bernie-sanders-candidatesA poem about carpet squareshttps://codygough.com/2016/01/18/a-poem-about-carpet-squares/
https://codygough.com/2016/01/18/a-poem-about-carpet-squares/#commentsTue, 19 Jan 2016 00:37:15 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1453Today’s poem—or, more precisely, the poem I wrote on March 27, 2003—will test the old adage “write what you know,” as its subject matter is something with which we’re all perhaps too familiar: carpet squares.

I don’t believe the classrooms in my high school even had carpeting, so I’m not sure why this particular topic inspired me to write a poem in my high school creative writing class, but here we are: my poem about carpet squares, followed by some nonsensical paragraph that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything:

Transcript:

My poietry About Carpet SquaresFour sides, not equalSeparated at birth…?OR PERHAPS AT DEATHThe death of their tortured existenceSitting on their fat, lazy behindsEncompassed in darkness, suffocatingUntil they see the lightBut never again can they be wholeFor the cuts are more than just skin deep…They’re CARPET deepBut you don’t care when you violate its personal spaceTime to unnecessarily rhymeAnd get all up in the carpet square’s faceMaybe some day it will get the respect it deserves…but probably not, because that would just be stupid

Sherades is a fun game which we should play more often. However I also like poietry—not poetry, POIETRY. Now my writing size is enormouslicious due to copying other styles and forms of writing hugely to fill up pages upon pages of notes in their notebooks, regardless of what class it may or may not be!

Analysis:

“Encompassed in darkness, suffocating” is a bit dark for my normally happy-go-lucky writing in high school, but I do like the following part about the light (even if it is followed by some indication that they can never be whole again)

“They’re CARPET deep” is the best line of poetry you’ve read this week, and if you disagree then you’re lying

“Time to unnecessarily rhyme” is also genius… please email me if you’d like me to give me money to write more things that are genius (I’m not joking)

I have LITERALLY no idea what the charades bit is about, and I’m somewhat appalled at High School Me’s idea of how the word “charades” is spelled, but as I write this post, a Google search for the word “enormouslicious” yields zero results, so I was basically the most ingenious high school student to ever live and you should be like really impressed

I dunno, man. Sometimes I feel like I have to write a lot about something when I post an analysis, but other times I think the work speaks for itself. Does this poem totally suck? No, if you ask me (which you did implicitly when you started reading something I wrote). The poem is smart, tells a story, has some vague ambiguities (the hallmark of all poetry), and even rhymed at one point, which it even pointed out when it did. And if that’s not high art, then you’re not smoking enough weed, know what I’m sayin’? THAT WAS A MARIJUANA JOKE

But seriously, folks: it’s been a long year. Let’s celebrate the fact that we’ve nearly reached the end of our annual trip around the sun by reviewing that one time I analyzed my creative writing class:

Transcript:

So we’re critiquing Osric’s poem right now… of course I don’t know what the hell it’s talking about, but whatever. I think his poetry is way too poetic for this class… he’s obviously WAY out of everyone here’s league. Like, it would be like John Coltrane playing music for a first grade class or something; it’s SO far above everyone’s even plane of understanding or thought or whatever that they can’t even understand / comprehend / appreciate what the hell is going on. But whatever. I’m just writing to write anyway. Yeah, the stuff I write online is more clever and more in quantity than most things I’d ever write longhand, but I guess typing is evil or something or whatever all of a sudden. I definitely didn’t think we’d just do poetry in this class. I wanted to learn writing techniques, structure styles, and everything and anything I could about fiction writing. But no. In high school—this one, anyway—there are two extremes: essays and poetry. Nothing is inbetween; nothing worth credit, anyway. Essays are rigidly structured about rigid topics which are graded rigidly; poems have no structure, no necessary subject, and no basis whatsoever on which they can be graded other than on a “good job, here’s 100%” basis. In my world, fantasy and reality are one and the same, but in class, they must must MUST remain separate domains. So now, it’s my turn to think I can do something I can’t. At least not for credit, anyway. I probably won’t even get credit for this damn page… hell, I’ll probably upload it to my web page, or even submit it to the Auburnite, at this rate. At this point/rate I’m sounding poetic, which is quite ironic, since I generally really hate poetry. I could probably write a fucking poem about this page, but whatever, I don’t want to. I liked Lori’s poem a lot today, and I really liked Sha’Donna’s, too. But this class in general just kind of pisses me off. A lot. At least Brynn’s here. I’m going to miss her, too. A lot. Fucking poetry.

Analysis: I’m a genius. *Drops mic, walks away.*

HA HA I ALWAYS THINK/DO THAT but seriously, here are some things (and yes, I’m about to analyze my analysis of something, so it’s about to get meta in here):

Osric was this dude whose poetry destroyed. No, seriously. He had SOUL. I think he did beat poetry sometimes. I hope he’s doing slam poetry and motivationally speaking to inner city kids or something these days. The guy was really nice and had a great mind.

No, I don’t know the difference between beat and slam poetry.

At the time I took my creative writing class, I ran a web site, on which I occasionally posted about the goings-on in my life. It was really a “blog” before the disgusting word “blog” was invented, to make writing sound like vomiting. The word was probably invented by testosterone-overloaded douchebags who wanted to give the most unappealing name in the world to an activity that sometimes requires independent thought. Probably Troy Aikman. I hate listening to him talk more than literally anyone else in the world except for Michael Cole and maybe Billy Corgan. You’ll have to Google the first guy’s name on your own, because I hate him.

On my blog web site, I also wrote a satirical story spanning several chapters about my classmates, dubbed “The Auburn Chronicles.” It was shockingly popular with my classmates, some of whom would actually print it out and bring it to school with them. A cute girl once actually told me in class that it was really funny, and it may have been the first time a girl had voluntarily spoken to me in my life. I was like, 15.

You might even call The Auburn Chronicles a fanfic, but I don’t think the term had been invented yet, or at least I wasn’t aware of it. But I was a big fan of myself, so I’m sure the “fan” moniker would have applied. I was an innovator, what can I say?

I ALSO had written an extensive three-part fanfic about a fictional professional wrestling pay-per-view that featured a slew of video game, Anime, and other sci-fi and fantasy characters competing in various types of matches against my friends and me. Part 1 was something generic like the Royal Rumble, Part 2 was the King of the Universe Tournament (based off of WWE’s King of the Ring Tournament), and Part 3 was Ultimania (like Wrestlemania, only, uh… ultimate). They were all long.

Because of the extensive amount of creative writing that I’d done on my blog, I felt entitled to some sort of different standards when being graded, as our assignments were generally “write something” and I was already doing that for fun for literally hours after school each week. Clearly, I was frustrated that my teacher had not agreed to hold me to these different standards. As an adult, I can understand why that would be a hard thing to resolve, but at the time when I wrote these notes, I was neither legally nor mentally / emotionally an adult (but I definitely was physically, because I’m the bomb dot com, LADIES).

I said “whatever” 5 times on one page. That’s an average of once every 6-ish lines. The phrase “…whatever” was often used by Squall Leonhart, the main character of 1999’s Final Fantasy VIII, and I adopted that as my signature at the end of all of my blog website posts. Apparently it crept into my other writing, too.

I seriously can’t remember the last time I said the phrase “what the hell” out loud. It’s SO HIGH SCHOOL, AM I RIGHT?

At first I thought these notes were whiny; then, I got to the line “There are two extremes: essays and poetry.” And I realized I was a GOD DAMN GENIUS

“In my world, fantasy and reality are one in the same, but in class, they must must MUST remain separate domains” is definitely poetic in its own way. I dig it. A-plus for teenage Cody, these notes are awesome.

I recall having a general disdain for poetry, probably because I had neither mastery of nor patience for it—the former perhaps being a catalyst for the latter. I also find poetry in many things, perhaps ironically; for example, this paragraph. Very meta indeed.

The “hell, I’ll probably upload it to my web page” line is hilarious because I did do that… 12 and a half years later. Amazing prediction skills. Where are my notes on who wins the Super Bowl next year?!

The Auburnite was our high school newspaper, which you probably figured out by now. Just giving you context; please direct any and all inquiries / letters to the editor there.

The day after writing this page (which I think rules), I wrote two poems, both so violent and profane that I can’t even post them here after censoring them, the second of which directly attacks poetry. The first two lines of this poetry poem read:

Stupid poetryYeah, piss me off

And I literally have to stop there because it deteriorates so quickly. You can, in fact, read my written apology for these poems, although my apology also is too offensive to post in its entirety. Thus, my next blog post will skip ahead a couple days to the point in my notes where my writing is acceptable for a 2015 (or 2016, depending on timing) audience.

Anyway, for the record: today I don’t harbor the same resentment for poetry that I did back in high school. And it seems that a lot of my resentment was tied into “getting credit” for the work that I did. So I’ve buried the hatchet with poetry… or so it seems. FOR NOW.

And on a side note: resentment for not being given proper credit is definitely something I still resent. Which is why this entire post is laden with irony if you’re reading it on a third-party site that ripped it off… whatever.

]]>https://codygough.com/2015/12/19/that-time-i-analyzed-my-creative-writing-class/feed/0codygoughMarch 25, 2003: I analyze my creative writing classThe most dramatic game of Werewolf ever played, part 2: a story of ageshttps://codygough.com/2015/08/24/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-2-the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-full-story/
https://codygough.com/2015/08/24/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-2-the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-full-story/#respondMon, 24 Aug 2015 15:16:12 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1434If you’re asking yourself “what’s Werewolf?” then you need to read part 1 of this story, in which I describe Werewolf and my feelings about the game. If not, then I hope your body is ready.

To recap: this is an epic tale of deception, of security guards, of teenagers, of drunkenness, of meltdowns, of suspicion, of betrayal, of murder, of mystery. And I must set the stage with the cast.

Ryan: A friend of mine for years, Ryan is exceptionally good at Werewolf. It’s fun playing with him because he and I can’t read each other, so we are always suspicious of each other. Ryan wears glasses and has spiked up black hair that makes him vaguely look like Vegeta.

Ninja: A Werewolf GOD. He attends something like 40 gaming/Anime/nerd conventions a year, and basically plays Werewolf for at least 8 hours straight every night of each of them. He probably played literally 60 hours of Werewolf during Gen Con this year alone. He has played every variation and has figured out the logic needed to pick out the Werewolf pretty much every time. He also has some ambiguous relationship with Gen Con so I think he’s technically part of the staff? Ninja is the closest you can probably get to being a professional Werewolf player. And he kinda looks like Snoop Dogg (and I mean that in the most complimentary possible way).

Bearded Mod: Came over from the game that Ninja was playing prior to our game. This guy is probably in his early 40s, and his Werewolf prowess is in the ballpark of Ninja’s skill level. Very experienced. Wears a baseball cap and has long blonde hair in a ponytail that falls midway down his back.

Child Mod: Probably 16 or 17 years old, lanky, somewhat socially awkward. Kinda looks like McLovin, only not funny or ironic. In fact, take away all the good associations you have with McLovin and make him lankier, younger, more awkward, and just generally worse at life, and you’ve got Child Mod.

Abercrombie: A friend of Child Mod. Looks like an 18 or 19 year old who is extremely well adjusted and was clearly the most likely person in the group to ever be able to get a girlfriend (other than me, of course). Very smart, socially well-adjusted, well-mannered, and more or less good at Werewolf. Some mix of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Taylor Lautner, only way less jacked.

Drunk Creeper: Some like 35-year-old dude who was so drunk, he could barely speak. Looked like a less fat Chris Farley with worse hair.

Celtic Shirt: Drunk Creeper’s friend, who joined the game along with him. Celtic Shirt was also drunk, but more highly functional, and around the same age as his drunk friend, only brunette and stocky, but not fat. Black shirt with a big red Celtic knot on it.

Zombie Drunk: A guy who was so drunk, he literally could not function. I don’t really remember what he looks like, but he was probably in his mid-20s.

Millennial: One of the main characters of the story. 18-year-old girl who had a rainbow and/or some form of LGBT Pride sticker on literally everything she owned (including her hair—this is not a joke). Also carried a box of pills and was on at least 6 different medications, the combination of which was presumably to combat depression, OCD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, some sort of anxiety disorder, and/or to counteract the side effects of each other. Extremely opinionated, outspoken, cocksure, and a self-described “complete bitch.” Her language was so aggressive, I initially thought she was a 35-year-old dominatrix. Probably spends most of her free time on Tumblr. Imagine literally everything you hate about Millennials, and this girl was all of those things times twelve.

Sister: Millennial’s sister, whose sister had such a strong personality that her entire identity in our minds was defined by her relationship to her sister. 17 years old, much quieter than her sister. Looks like Ann from Arrested Development. Yes, “her.”

Green Shirt: Some kid in a neon green shirt. This was his second or third Werewolf game ever. Sophomore or Junior in high school, from what we could tell. Kinda sounded like Homestar Runner when he talked. Barely talked, always very polite when he did. Not really relevant until the end of the story.

There were a few other people involved in this game, but they aren’t really relevant to the drama that took place. 7 of the people listed above were among the final 7 characters in the game.

To explain exactly why this game was dramatic: we started the game around 3:30 a.m. Saturday. The thing about Werewolf is that some games go a half hour, and other games go 2-3 hours. Like with many things in life, there is a tipping point where you have invested so much time in something, it becomes imperative that you finish it: if you’re playing a 6-hour board game with friends and you get 4 hours in, then it doesn’t matter how tired you are or how bored you are—you HAVE to finish so it doesn’t feel like it was a waste of time. This is why the board game Monopoly ruins every friendship.

Of course, not everyone operates this way, but I do, and so, from what I can tell, do most Werewolf players. So throughout this story, you absolutely must realize that every incident that threatened the completion of the game was, in my mind, extremely dramatic. As a minor spoiler, I’ll say that the game went past 5:00 a.m., and by that point, you can be damn sure that a game ending prematurely would have been infuriating (“why did I just stay up all night to play a game that didn’t even end?!”). There’s some level of “you had to be here” in this story, but I feel like this should give you enough background to understand that the stakes were high.

Ryan and our friend Guy and I were wandering around the Indiana Convention Center around 2:30 a.m. Sunday looking for a game of Werewolf to join. After around 8:00 or 9:00 every evening at Gen Con (and at many nerd-centric conventions), you can generally find groups of 12-35 people playing in the hallways, sometimes in chairs, sometimes simply in a circle on the floor, through the night and straight on until morning. Despite the popularity of the game, however, it’s sometimes difficult to find a game to join, as you can only join a game as it’s starting, and sometimes every game you come across will be in the 30th minute of the third round of lynching, which means you’re looking at at least another hour before that group’s game ends and they begin another game that you can join. Ryan and Guy and I had this problem of not finding any groups of people who were between games, until we stumbled across a group of 7-8 players who were just about to disperse.

Many of them were planning on going to bed because “everyone else was leaving,” but Ryan and I convinced many of them to stay, as they were willing to keep playing as long as we had numbers to add to the group. Among the players we found were Millennial and Sister, and most of the other players in this game were younger (high school or college, or very early 20s). It was a young group, but what the hell—it’s Werewolf, so how bad could they be?

The answer is: very bad.

Millennial dominated the conversation at all times. Lynching was random at best (I was killed in the first round because I was wearing a red shirt, because, quote, “red shirts always die first in Star Trek”). There was little to no strategy, everyone seemed to be in a hurry to finish every round, and Guy quit after one game because it was so dumb. In fact, several people quit, making the group too small for a good game.

Ryan and I wanted to find more players, so we told everyone to go wrangle some more people. Sure, the stragglers who wanted to keep playing were terrible and generally stupid, but they were at least willing to play through the night, and we figured that was a good start. So Ryan and I walked over to a game where we had seen Ninja playing earlier, and as luck would have it, they had literally just concluded their game. We asked if he’d like to join our game, Child Mod overheard us and told us that he’d love to come call (moderate) the game. Bearded Mod, who had also been playing in this game, also joined.

We returned to find that Millennial had rounded up a few people as well, and a new game was afoot. We had now reached about 15 players, which is a pretty good size for a Werewolf game. And this, really, is where the story begins.

We were using our friend’s custom deck to play the game (available for free on Google Play!), so Ryan, who was familiar with the cards, was planning on calling the game. However, Child Mod basically had a panic attack at the thought of not calling the game. Imagine a 6-year-old who wants ice cream, standing next to the freezer screaming “MOMMY, I WANT ICE CREAM!! MOMMY, I WANT ICE CREAM NOW!!” and flipping out until he gets his ice cream. Imagine Veruca Salt, only less patient. This was Child Mod. I honestly think he would have screamed and cried and possibly had a panic attack and spontaneously combusted if we hadn’t let him call the game.

The thing about Werewolf is that it’s a pretty simple game to call. Here’s your script:

Everyone go to sleep

Werewolves, wake up and point at someone you want to kill

Werewolves, go to sleep

Seer, wake up

Seer, point at who you think is a werewolf (caller gives a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate if it’s a werewolf)

Seer, go to sleep

Everyone, wake up

In the night, a werewolf killed person X, good luck figuring out whom to kill next

It’s not rocket science. Sometimes, there are additional roles, but we were playing with literally one additional special class (the Sorcerer, which I’ll get to later). So add an extra step into the game, in which literally every step above is in basically every game ever played, and there’s your job. It is not hard. And yet it took literally over 20 minutes for Ryan to explain the cards, and by “explain the cards,” I mean “convince Child Mod to let us play with the classes we wanted to use.” It would be like if you planned on getting married, and your cousin insisted “I MUST cater this wedding, allow me to cater this wedding” and you’re like “that’s fine, just make sure you have a vegetarian option, as the bride’s entire family is vegetarian” and being told “NO, I WILL NOT SERVE VEGETARIAN OPTIONS, I WILL DO THINGS MY WAY BECAUSE I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF HOW TO INTERACT WITH HUMAN BEINGS.” That was Child Mod.

We had to do the first sleep phase twice because Child Mod was incapable of doing his incredibly easy job. And that’s where things started getting patently ludicrous.

“Village, wake up. You must choose a member of the town to lynch.” These are typical words of a caller, and this was a rare instance when Child Mod actually did no wrong; however, the ramifications of his precise wording was immediate. Celtic Shirt was enraged.

“Why are we killing someone? The werewolves didn’t kill anybody last night, so why is a sleepy village just killing its own people? That doesn’t make any sense. I’m NOT PLAYING THIS GAME.” These are actual words a person said. And Bearded Mod started to chime in with his disapproval as well. Yes, that’s right: the game was about to implode because the storyline didn’t make sense.

Here’s the thing: the makeup of a Werewolf game is calculated very deliberately at the beginning based on the number of players. For example, many decks of Werewolf cards assign a numeric value to roles in order to attempt to balance each team, e.g. a villager is worth 1 point and a Werewolf is worth -6 points; therefore, if you have 7 players, then you should have six villagers and one werewolf (1+1+1+1+1+1+(-6)=0) to achieve the most numerically balanced game. A Seer counts as more positive points, and the Sorcerer, a couple negative points, so the cards and roles are calculated to compensate for larger groups. When someone threatens to immediately quit a game, that specifically calculated balance is instantly thrown off, which would be less of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that games rarely achieve a perfect balance, so one team is usually already at an advantage. If the game has already started at a -2 Werewolf advantage (because negative cards are good for werewolves), and two villagers rage quit (thus leaving the werewolves at a -4 advantage), then the village is gonna have a bad time.

You can see, then, the problem that arose when this argument immediately escalated into both Bearded Mod and Celtic Shirt threatening to quit the game because the storyline didn’t make sense. “Okay, fine, you all found a dead body in the night, you could tell that a Werewolf did it, now you have to lynch somebody,” Child Mod attempted, which in his defense was a reasonable thing to do, despite his general inability to be “the loudest voice in the room.” Somehow even that attempt at exposition was thwarted by repeated insistence that the storyline still didn’t make sense, and the villagers needed a compelling reason to kill someone. Never in my several years of playing Werewolf have I seen a game potentially end so quickly. It was stupid.

While I was distracted by the existential crisis the players of the game were having about their true purpose in life as villagers and/or werewolves in a made-up village that ultimately has no relevance to gameplay whatsoever, I failed to notice that Drunk Creeper, whom was sitting next to Sister (who, remember, is 17), allegedly said something creepy and/or stared at her at some point during all this insanity. Millennial started to FREAK OUT and basically called him a pedophile several times in front of the entire group, to which Drunk Creeper responded by staring off into space and looking about as vacant as an hourly rate motel in Utah. See, the joke I was trying to make is that a lot of people in Utah are conservative and thus don’t rent seedy motels to have sex with one another. I hope you enjoyed this edition of “Cody makes an analogy and then explains it in painstaking detail to make it funnier.” I know I did (and frankly, this is my web site, so that’s really all I care about anyway).

So anyway, Millennial insisted that some dude move in the circle to sit between Drunk Creeper and Sister. This was incredibly awkward, but served as a distraction from the aforementioned argument about “the true meaning of the game” and got us on track to actually play. We played out the first game, which was relatively uneventful, other than this really awful player (“Tanktop,” we called him) insisting to the point of basically swearing on his mother’s grave that I was a werewolf, based on an irrelevant side conversation I’d had with Bearded Mod, who was a player in this game. I was not a werewolf, and so the entire game was highly annoying, but I believe the village won, so I at least took the victory.

Having now played a game with this group, we had kind of familiarized ourselves with the group and the dynamic, and were ready for a second game, which is almost always better than the first game with a given group. Cool, right? Nope. Ninja walked over to Drunk Creeper and told him that if he didn’t leave immediately, he would get convention security. He stood right over him and told him he had one minute to get away from Sister and Millennial. That’s when Celtic Shirt stepped in, and by “stepped in” I mean “stepped right up to Ninja and got in his face.”

“Listen, man,” he said. “I don’t appreciate you threatening my friend like that.” Ninja replied calmly but assertively: “I’m not threatening him. I’m telling him that he needs to leave or I’ll get security. I didn’t insult him or yell at him. I’m telling him he needs to leave. And so do you.”

So at this point there are 10+ of us sitting there basically watching a fight about to happen. Tensions were running high! Fortunately, Celtic Shirt wasn’t as drunk as his friend, so he picked up his friend and left. This led to a several-minute monologue from Millennial about how creepy Drunk Creeper had been, how sorry she was for finding him and bringing him into the group (“I didn’t know they were drunk!”), and a bunch of other words that accomplished nothing other than attracting everyone’s attention to her for several minutes. She probably felt like she was in heaven pretty much that entire time.

Meanwhile, Child Mod was having a borderline panic attack over the rules of the game and insisting that we use his cards for the next game. Never mind that we’d invited people specifically to play with our friend’s deck, which he’d asked us to play test: Child Mod had printed his own custom Werewolf cards, which looked like Magic Cards, and decided that we would play with his deck and he would determine all the rules. Note that this is not the role of the moderator: the role of the moderator is to facilitate a game that the players want to play. We tried explaining this to him several times, but eventually bent to his prepubescent will, mostly for fear that if we didn’t, he would hyperventilate and/or fly into a Super-Saiyajin 2 rage and murder us all.

With Drunk Creeper and Celtic Shirt gone, it was time to start the next game. The first round ended somewhat quickly, with someone irrelevant being lynched by the town; on the first night, the werewolves killed Zombie Drunk, a guy who during the first round occasionally said something incomprehensible, and generally seemed so out of it that he didn’t even know where he was. He wasn’t acting drunk so much as generally devoid of thought; the lights were on, but nobody was home. However, he continued to sit in our circle, presumably due to an inability to actually stand up on his own. The town made another inconsequential kills, and then the werewolves killed Bearded Mod, which was a major blow, as he’s a skilled player. And this is where the real game began.

The next round of discussion lasted well over an hour. Ninja dominated the discussion, which, to Millennial’s credit, she actually listened to and tried to understand. But it was utter mind games. Ninja suggested that he was suspicious of Abercrombie or someone, and Ryan agreed; but because he agreed, somehow, that implicated Ryan as a werewolf, because he was too quick to agree to Ninja’s logic, which he then claimed wasn’t logical, he was just explaining a theory to people to “see who would go along with it.” Similar mindgames are commonplace in Werewolf games, but Ninja was next-level, generally thinking 3 steps ahead and employing tactics like “I said this and you agreed, so this means this, but JUST KIDDING it actually means that. Do you agree? You do? Oh, well, then now I know you’re evil, because you shouldn’t agreed, because reasons,” and so on. On one hand, his playing was brilliant; on the other, it got complicated to the point where you weren’t sure when to trust him, when he was trying to lay a trap for you, or whether he was just a werewolf who was going to trick the village into killing each other every turn. Also keep in mind that at this point it was around 5:00 a.m., so everyone was tired, it was hard to follow complicated logic, and physical “tells” were less, uh… telling? Because of general fatigue.

Over an hour into our discussion, Child Mod was growing restless. He sighed heavily. “You guys need to hurry up and just pick someone, I’m getting tired and I WANT to go to bed,” he whined to everyone. And when I say whine, I mean “whine.” It was so whiny it was outrageous. Now, every time he claimed he wanted to go to bed, we offered to let him leave. Bearded Mod told him several times “just give me the cards and I’ll call,” but Child Mod exclaimed “NO, I want to finish the game, I just ALSO want to go to bed! I’m not leaving until the game is over, I just need you guys to hurry UP so I can sleep!”

After the third or fourth time this exchange occurred, Ninja had lost his patience. He explained to Child Mod that the role of a moderator isn’t to “run” the game: it’s to facilitate a game. Bearded Mod chimed in. “Your job is literally to say ‘village go to sleep,’ ‘village wake up,’ and then shut the fuck up and walk away until a vote happens.” Child Mod didn’t like that and argued that he’s been moderating “all night” and he was “really good at it.” He declared that he was going to set a 10-minute time limit to end the next round, which resulted in Ninja explaining that “the players determine the rules, and we don’t want a timer. None of us agreed on the timer. You can’t just impose your rules on us.” Child Mod argued. Ninja finally snapped.

“You know what I think? Honestly? I think you’re ruining the game for everyone. We have now spent literally ten minutes talking to you about going to bed, and none of this discussion is about the game. You’re making the game less fun for me. I’m having less fun as a direct result of you. And now the game is completely off track. Honestly? I think you’re a bad moderator. I don’t think you’re a good moderator.”

At this point, Child Mod broke down. We’re talking Leave Britney Alone levels of breaking down. He got intensely angry, started crying, gave Ninja the finger, started hyperventilating, started screaming. Insisted that Ninja had insulted him, to which Ninja clarified that he didn’t insult Child Mod’s character as a person, but was merely expressing his opinion that Child Mod was a bad moderator. It was uncomfortable. It was around 5:30 a.m. at this point, there was a screaming crying kid moderating the game who wouldn’t leave, and, worst of all, he had the potential to immediately end the game by revealing the roles of each player. “Okay, fine, I’m a bad mod? Fine, then here are who the werewolves are,” he could have easily said, and rage ended the already ~2-hour long game.

Tensions were high. Plus, I thought he might take a swing at Ninja, which would have ended very poorly for him. Would the game continue, or was this it?!

Bearded Mod stepped in. “I’m going to call the rest of this game. You and I are gonna take a walk.” He walked around the circle collecting all of our cards (from Child Mod’s custom cards that he gave us all so we knew our roles, remember), and somehow got Child Mod to his feet. He got the slobbering mess to step away, and he left the area. But while the issue of moderating had been resolved, there was now a new problem: Ninja.

Ninja felt very bad for making Child Mod cry. “I’m sorry you guys, but I don’t think I can play anymore. I just ruined someone’s night. I don’t think I can keep playing the game.” 2 hours into a game, our most vocal and strategic player was about to rage quit. He asked the group, “I wasn’t mean, was I? You understand, me telling him he was a bad mod was just my opinion. My opinion isn’t fact. I was only talking about his ability to call the game, not making a statement about him as a person.”

Keep in mind that Abercrombie is still in the group at this point. The delicate balance of the game was now threatened not only by Ninja’s self-loathing and lack of motivation to finish the game, but also by Abercrombie’s friendship with Child Mod, which could easily result in him leaving to hate our group in solidarity with his friend. The health of the game was in double jeopardy, and not the fun kind where you can win a bunch of money from Alex Trebek.

Ninja began to talk about his feelings. And by “talk about his feelings,” I mean “get into some heavy shit.” He talked about his background, about how he was shy growing up but became extroverted, about how it was basically his worst nightmare to offend anyone. He asked Green Shirt why he was so quiet all the time, and Green Shirt said he was shy because he didn’t want to say something bad to offend anyone. Ninja empathized, saying that he used to be the same way, and how that had changed over time. At this point, any discussion that was relevant to our game had been halted for quite some time. It was very, very late / early into the next morning, and everyone was tired. Sister was almost asleep on her backpack. A few other players looked exhausted. The chances of someone spontaneously leaving this game was growing exponentially with every passing second, and I recognized this. Finally, I stepped in.

“So, this is actually a really productive discussion, and I think it’s awesome to talk about all these issues,” I said, somehow getting everyone’s attention. “But I think it might be more productive to have it after the game. I think there was a miscommunication between you and Child Mod and he took some things the wrong way, but we all understand the situation now, and I feel like it’s been resolved. Could we maybe try to finish and focus on the fun game we were having, and then talk after?” Ninja rejected the idea. “But I don’t want to play anymore. It’s not fun for me.” My patience, which was admittedly far more abundant than it had any right to be at 5:00 a.m., helped me push through. “What can we do to make you feel comfortable playing the rest of this game? Anything?” I asked. He said “No, because my feelings are hurt.”

Werewolf, as a game, has a symbiotic relationship with its players: if one player quits, then the game’s inherent structure is damaged. Now, imagine a boring looking first date. Imagine sitting at Applebee’s and glancing over at another table to see some man or woman prattling on, and the other person at the table nodding mindlessly or glancing around or even checking their phone because frankly, they’d rather be anywhere else. Yet the person stays, generally out of a perceived obligation to be courteous or polite or follow some other pattern of behavior that society deems it important to emulate. Now imagine that the aforementioned feeling of obligation does not exist. You now see a pair of people, one of whom could leave the table at any second, leaving his or her former dinner partner to pick up the now depressingly underutilized spinach and artichoke dip that they were supposed to share while talking about things like what they do to make money, or which Netflix shows they watch in the time they have to waste in-between spending time at a particular place or doing a particular activity to help them make money to pay for Netflix. As I looked around the Werewolf group, which had now gone longer than a half hour without actually discussing the game we were supposedly playing, I imagined that there was about to be a hell of a lot of proverbial leftover spinach and artichoke dip, the volume of which was increasing with every second we spent psycho-analyzing shy behavior or what it means to insult someone.

Fortunately, I must have been wearing a Shirt of Diplomacy +13 or something, because another question struck me. “Ninja. You’ve been the most vocal player in this game, and I feel it would actually cause more people to stop having fun if you quit. What can we do to make you feel comfortable moving on in the game?” Ninja thought for a moment. “How about this: I’ll just sit here for the rest of the game, and I won’t just quit… but I’m not going to say a word for the rest of the game. No more talking.” It’d be like an injured Aaron Rodgers saying that he’ll play a game, but won’t pass the ball, and will only hand it off. Kinda fine, but kinda useless. Whether we agreed to this stipulation or not, I felt the game was essentially doomed.

Then, a minor miracle happened: Millennial, whom had spent most of the game trying to decipher anything Ninja was saying, asked him a question. I should note at this point that she has the most overly melodramatic pattern of speech I have ever heard. “Okay, fine. But… BEFORE. You stop talking? [Dramatic pause while she points at herself, her mouth hanging open as if she were searching for words, even though she clearly already had them, but was just saving them, as if their value would accrue interest while sitting in her brain waiting to excrete from her throat] I need… you. To tell me. [Points at everyone around her] Exactly… what. The hell. You were… [Long pause] TRY………. ing. To say. About… WHO. Are the werewolves?” It took her about 15 minutes to vomit this sentence into our heads. It felt like seven hours.

Ninja responded by recounting the most recent theory we had discussed before Child Mod’s complete breakdown. Millennial interrupted Ninja several times to ask clarifying questions, because she just couldn’t follow anything at that point. As Ninja continued to explain himself, new theories and conversations sparked. Miraculously, the game had spontaneously resumed. And trust me: nobody was more surprised than I.

Ninja had made several valid points about the potential for many members of the group to be werewolves, including Ryan and, somehow, me. Yet we ended up lynching an inconsequential person in this story, whom had been sitting somewhat quietly next to me this entire time. Poor him. Bearded Mod had returned with Child Mod at this point, so Bearded Mod had us all go to sleep, the werewolves killed someone else, and we all woke up. Progress!

As we started discussing the next round, it became abundantly clear that Zombie Drunk, who had remained in the circle despite having been killed basically at the beginning of the game, had no idea where he was. He started trying to mumble something about who he thought might be a werewolf. Here’s the problem with this: when you get killed in Werewolf, you get to hang out and watch the game continue. This means that once you’ve been killed, you can watch the village go to sleep and continue watching to see the werewolves wake up at night to kill someone, immediately revealing to you which villagers were actually bad guys. This means that Zombie Drunk now held the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, just as Child Mod had throughout the game, in that he could reveal the identities of the werewolves and immediately ruin/end the game.

As he slowly spoke in tongues and the group became increasingly aware of his inability to function, Bearded Mod stepped over to try to help him to his feet so they could “take a walk.” Zombie Drunk sounded like he was having a stroke as his incoherent gargling accelerated, until at one point I thought he might honestly try to eat someone’s brains. Throughout his vague gesturing and slobbering sound effects, there was the very real and very dangerous possibility that he would sabotage the game. But once again, Bearded Mod prevailed: he “took a walk” with Zombie Drunk (presumably over to security) and the game continued!

While all this was happening, by the way, the snot-nosed brat Child Mod had returned, laid down on the ground behind his friend Abercrombie with his head resting on his backpack, and started watching the game. He was now neither participating in the game nor sleeping, which means that I have no idea what his motivations were. But it added a level of awkwardness to the game, as he basically stared at Ninja every few minutes, persistently throughout the remainder of our time together.

We took a bathroom break after the next round because at this point it was past 7:00 a.m., leaving six of us alive: Ryan, Ninja, Millennial, Sister, Green Shirt, and me. There were 2 werewolves left. That meant that we had to kill a werewolf; otherwise, if we (the village) killed someone, then everyone would go to sleep and the werewolves would kill someone, and then there would be 4, two of whom were werewolves (werewolves win). It was time to get serious.

Then, Millennial’s dad called.

See, it was 7:30 a.m., and the girls—Millennial, 18, and Sister, 17—told their dad they’d be back in the hotel room by 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. So this was not good.

We all listened intently as Millennial stood up to take the call. It was obviously her Oscar-winning performance of the night, as her face twisted and contorted and grimaced every time her dad started speaking, as if she were Peter Parker listening to J. Jonah Jameson. I imagine that in reality, he was actually on the other line sleepily just asking where his daughters were, but that didn’t stop her from making it seem like literally the most important thing that had ever happened. Then again, the game was at risk of prematurely ending after over 4 hours of drama, so at that point, it kind of was the most important thing occurring at the time.

Would we be safe?! Would the game continue?!

FIND OUT IN PART THREE OF…

Ha ha, just kidding. Yeah, she kept playing. And the most brilliant play perhaps of all time happened.

Sister was suspicious to everyone. Millennial had spent literally almost the whole game explaining in excruciating detail every minor “tell” her Sister was exhibiting, always followed by 5-10 minutes of “ALTHOUGH… I’m not. [Long pause] SURE. [Long pause] I’m not… POSITIVE. That… [Long pause, points at everyone around her, does some weird hand gestures, probably somehow tweets while flailing like an idiot] It’s just because she’s tired…. [Long pause] OR… because…” etc. I literally don’t even want to keep thinking about it because it will make me want to stop writing this story, but you get the idea: she sucks, and was hell-bent on getting Sister killed.

Sister snapped. “You know what? Fine. Kill me. I’m sick of this. I’m a werewolf. And you know what? So is she. Millennial is a werewolf. Just kill her first. Because you know what? We’re on the same team, and she’s done nothing the entire game but try to get me killed. So kill her first, and I don’t even care if you guys win, I just want her to die first, because I’m sick of it, and at least I can say I lasted longer.” This was coming from a sleep-deprived, presumably unstable, emotional 17-year-old girl. There was no way she wasn’t telling the truth. The game was up. We’d won!

…right?

Overall, everyone was suspicious of Sister and Millennial at most points; a couple people were on-and-off suspicious of me; nobody was really suspicious of Green Shirt or Ninja; and near the beginning of the game, Millennial had identified Ryan as the Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is “on the bad guy’s team” but doesn’t actually kill anyone; what he can do is identify the identity of the Seer, and then try to cast doubt on that person so the village kills their own Seer. You don’t have to kill the Sorcerer to win. So Ryan had spent most of the game safe, as everyone thought he was just a bad guy accessory, thus unproductive to kill, but also untrustworthy as a bad guy.

As Sister threw Millennial under the bus, Ryan claimed that he was the Seer and he knew Sister was a werewolf. Millennial then instantly claimed the same thing—that she was the Seer and Sister was a werewolf. It was a total cluster. I had no idea what to do.

We settled on killing off Sister. She was a werewolf.

The next round, the remaining werewolf killed Ryan. This was somewhat surprising, as Ninja seemed to have worked everything out at this point, and would have thus been a more logical kill, as he would undoubtedly “take the village home” the next round by helping us off the final werewolf.

It was down to me, Millennial, Green Shirt, and Ninja.Ninja told me to vote for Green Shirt. I don’t remember the logic, because at this point, we had been playing one game for nearly 5 hours straight and dealt with more drama than ever needs to happen during one stupid game. I pointed at Green Shirt. Ninja followed. Millennial joined in.

Green Shirt was the other werewolf. We won.

There were countless points in that 5-hour span when I thought the game was on the brink of oblivion. I was shocked that we had not only finished the game, but had also actually beaten the werewolves. Green Shirt had played it perfectly. And Sister, despite being generally quiet and not that “good” at the game, had played me like a fiddle with her outburst against her sister, Millennial. It was beautiful.

It turned out that Ryan was actually the Seer, but had essentially been black balled at the beginning of the game with everyone thinking he was the Sorcerer, so he was unable to participate nearly as much as he would have liked. Ninja and I had both been villagers. And this is where things get mildly more interesting: Millennial was the Sorcerer.

So why did she so readily vote for Green Shirt to die in the final round? By killing the last werewolf, her team lost. The Sorcerer loses if the werewolves lose.

Well, not in her mind. Millennial, being the embodiment of everything that everyone hates about The Entitled Generation, “just wanted to survive,” and “live secretly as a Sorcerer in a village happily ever after.” This tied everything back to the storyline conversation from the beginning of the game. It was also dumb and not how the game is supposed to be played. But that didn’t stop her from then recounting her version of why she won to literally everyone for about 30 minutes straight following the conclusion of the game. Technically, and based on the actual game that exists, Millennial lost: she was a bad guy, and the werewolves were killed, so her team lost. Period. But she was The Worst, so in her mind, somehow, this was a victory.

The most frustrating thing about the final revelation from Millennial is that by having a key player (e.g. a special Sorcerer character, not just a traditional villager) play the game wrong from the start, it means that the game kind of sucked, in a way. Despite the brilliant plays and the start-and-stop drama and the spontaneous psychoanalysis of each player, it was still far from a perfect game. Especially considering the drama therein. TL;DR recap:

The kids we met were terrible at the game

Celtic Shirt nearly imploded the first game because of “the storyline”

Drunk Creeper hit on underage girls and got kicked out of the convention center

Celtic Shirt threatened a fist fight with Ninja

Zombie Drunk escorted to security after almost ruining the game

Child Mod meltdown almost ended the game, derailed for over a half hour

Ninja threatened to quit, saying his feelings were hurt

Millennial and Sister almost got pulled away by their dad

All in all, a complete mess.

But damned if it didn’t make a good story.

]]>https://codygough.com/2015/08/24/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-2-the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-full-story/feed/0codygoughPhoto credit: Dave via FlickrThe most dramatic game of Werewolf ever played, part 1: a Werewolf primerhttps://codygough.com/2015/08/09/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-1/
https://codygough.com/2015/08/09/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-1/#commentsSun, 09 Aug 2015 16:47:47 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1430I must tell an an epic tale of deception, of security guards, of teenagers, of drunkenness, of meltdowns, of suspicion, of betrayal, of murder, of mystery. I must tell the tale of the most dramatic game of Werewolf I have ever played.

I feel that it is extremely important to communicate my exact feelings about Werewolf in order to help you fully comprehend the gravity of the drama that transpired during this legendary game, so I have broken up this tale into two parts; this, the first, shall focus on the mechanics of the game as I perceive them:

Werewolf, which you may know as Mafia, is the best party game ever invented (yes, even better than Cards Against Humanity). The rules are simple: a bunch of people sit in a circle, and they’re all villagers. But 1-3 of them are secretly werewolves. A “caller,” who runs the game, narrates when the village sleeps at night (closes their eyes) and announces whom the werewolves have decided to kill each morning, once the villagers have opened their eyes and risen from their slumber. The object of the game is for the villagers to deduce, through various methods, which of their neighbors are the werewolves… before they are all eaten.

Archive footage of a Werewolf game at Gen-Con 2011

There are many variations on the theme of Werewolf, such as Ultimate Werewolf, a very popular deck of cards that serves as a companion to the game and includes various additional characters, and Wolfnight, a recently released free app that one of my friends developed that also provides a variety of character options. The most common variations include a “Seer,” which is a villager with the mystical power to identify a werewolf (and whom may then strategically divulge that information in order to help the villagers win the game), and a “Sorcerer,” which is basically the bad guy version of the Seer, but whose precise mechanics I don’t recall. Here is the most basic video I’ve found explaining how the game is played and demonstrating how a game might actually go:

Every year I go to Gen-Con, the largest gaming convention in the world, and from 7 or 8 in the evening until about noon the following day, people play Werewolf. The night I discovered Werewolf at Gen-Con several years ago, I played for 7 hours straight, or until about 4 a.m.; the following evening, I played for 8 hours straight (until 6 a.m.), and the night after that, I played for a similar length of time. The game is ridiculously addictive, elaborate, and subtle; it is poker, it is psychology, it is logic, it is luck, it is paranoia, it is panic, it is emotion, it is politics, it is precise, and all of its qualities can be altered by an infinite number of variables. No two games can ever be the same, even if it’s the ninth game in a row played with the same group of twelve friends.

The majority of the “gameplay” of Werewolf consists of villagers debating whom they suspect may be a Werewolf—which, by the way, must most often be deduced with little to no verifiable information. For example, at the beginning of the game, the Caller announces “you all awake to find that someone in the village has been killed, and there is a werewolf among you. You must all vote on whom to kill before night falls.” That’s it. You have nothing beyond that. First-round kills are at best chosen because a player can convince his neighbors that someone in the village has a “tell,” much like in poker (“he didn’t look me in the eye when I asked him if he’s a werewolf,” etc.), and are at worst chosen because someone is wearing a red shirt (“Red shirts always die first in Star Trek, hur hur hur!”) or because someone has a beard and thus physically looks like a werewolf (this happens so often, I don’t think I would even play if I ever grew a beard).

Other first-round kills often include:

A player is tired and it’s 3 a.m. and insists he has to go to bed, so he sacrifices himself

“The guy next to me lied during the last game, so I don’t trust him, so I’m going to talk everyone into killing him”

One villager who is “usually quiet/loud/annoying/whatever” is not being that, so (s)he must be a werewolf

A player is killed because everyone knows he is amazing at the game, and will undoubtedly win if (s)he is a werewolf, so that player must be eliminated immediately to save the village a headache later

Second-round kills are generally more elaborate. Let’s say “dude with the tanktop” spent all of the first round trying to convince everyone that I’m a werewolf, and then after the first round, the werewolves kill that guy. Several things can be deduced:

Maybe I’m a werewolf and I killed him, to eliminate someone who was on to me

Maybe I’m NOT a werewolf, but the werewolf killed him because it would cast suspicion on me

Maybe I’m a werewolf and I killed him, thinking everyone would assume the second option

And so on. Werewolves must be good at bluffing. But at Gen-Con, at least, several factors play into the ability of players to detect whether other players are telling the truth. These factors include:

Alcohol / drugs (uncommon)

Lack of sleep (ubiquitous)

Being bad at lying

Being bad at telling the truth and not making it seem like you’re lying

Not knowing the other players’s tells

Not knowing the skill levels of other players (which is a HUGE factor)

Not knowing which of the above factors apply to the situation, or to what degree

The game I played only featured a Seer and a Sorcerer, in terms of non-village / non-werewolf characters, but other games of 20+ people have seen upwards of 10 other variable cards, all of which also tweak the game in a specific way and make it even more difficult to tell what’s going on. The game is easy to learn, and may be impossible to master.

Because of the variables involved, the length of time that it takes (or “should” take) to play a game is a point of immense contention among werewolf players, primarily old vs. new. Many times in a group of 16+, for example, some players will insist “we don’t have that much information, so it’s pointless to debate the third kill for an hour; we need to just kill someone and move on,” while other players will insist that “only a werewolf would say that” and that they should spend more time observing and discussing one another in order to make an informed decision. An inexperienced group of mostly high school and college students I found insisted that their games took no longer than 15-20 minutes to play, while a far more experienced group of older players (average player age: probably about 40 years) spent over 2 hours on a single game. Many players in each group would conceivably think that the other group was just wrong.

Recognizing this ideological discrepancy among players is necessary to understand the context of my story, so don’t forget this detail!

One last thing: “living” or “dying” is irrelevant to “winning” the game. If I’m a villager, then anything I can do to help the team kill all the werewolves is a thing I must do, even if it kills me. This is also important, but I’ll get back to it when I get to the story.

Now, I will return back to my notes: stay tuned for the story of the most dramatic game of Werewolf ever played!

]]>https://codygough.com/2015/08/09/the-most-dramatic-game-of-werewolf-ever-played-part-1/feed/2codygoughFile footage of a Werewolf game at Gen-Con 2011Actual advice for writing poetry, plus a poem that utilizes none of ithttps://codygough.com/2015/07/28/actual-advice-for-writing-poetry-plus-poem-utilizes-none-of-it-2/
https://codygough.com/2015/07/28/actual-advice-for-writing-poetry-plus-poem-utilizes-none-of-it-2/#respondTue, 28 Jul 2015 18:11:53 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1425First off, you’re welcome for the ABSOLUTELY FREE NOTES I’m about to give you from my Very Professional Public High School Education. It’s your (or your parents’) tax dollars that paid for this, and I’m nothing if not completely willing to help you maximize your return on investment. Read and learn, then be completely befuddled by whatever may follow:

Transcription:

Suggestions for revising a poem:1) Turn poem over & start again2) Change way poem looks on page3) Take problematic line & rewrite at LEAST 5 ways4) Find the “wrong turn” & go in a different direction5) Change or add a controlling metaphor6) Write a question word7) Try “surgery”—RADICAL surgery

March 23, 2001 – Jon [redacted] vomited ALL over in Ms. [rest of line unavailable]

“I have a question.”

(waits) <—– “What is it?” etc.

“Well… you can’t answer it.”

^

This quotation means a lot to me because it successfully confused the shit out of Captain. He wanted me to explain it to him because I told Heather that it was like super-subtle or something, but oh so wrong he was. Then he said something like “it’s like trying to solve a puzzle that’s not a puzzle, but neither of us can remember exactly what it was because ‘That was sooo long ago…'”

MY FIRST POEM: <— generic goth poem (THIS IS SATIRICAL, BY ME)Oh the painthe unbearable painthe world hates menobody understands meI might as well be deadnobody would care or noticesociety bitesgo to hell

This is one of the most rewarding things you will read on this web site, ever. You and I both know that the “generic goth poem” is completely hilarious and amazing, so I won’t even get into that. I also won’t pretend to understand the quote asserting that someone named Jon [Redacted] apparently vomited “all over in” something 2 years prior to the day on which I took these notes, because that raises too many questions to even fit into one blog post. Instead, let’s talk about the mind games going on in my imagined scenario regarding asking someone a question.

I was originally looking at my notes trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the whole imagined scenario on the page. By means of what mental gymnastics had I sent my high school friend Captain tumbling off his balance beam of logic? Before putting much thought into it, I decided to haphazardly test the scenario on an unsuspecting audience:

Me: I have a question.
My Girlfriend: Yes?
Me: Well… you can’t answer it.
My Girlfriend: Okay.(I walk over to her to get her attention and re-initiate the conversation)Me: Thanks. You’ll understand why I asked that later.
My Girlfriend: Um, okay… could you ask the Internet?
Me: Oh, no, I mean… There’s no context. There is no actual question.
My Girlfriend: Oh. Is that why I can’t answer it?

OH MY GOD

Think about this entire thing for a second. My notes actually lack any sort of explanation for the scenario that I had created to confound/infuriate one of my classmates, as I instead chose to focus on my utter delight at having pulled it off. And yet, there it is. My enigmatic confabulation was, as are many of my creations, decidedly meta. And I couldn’t be more proud of my teenage self.

This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments 10+ years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and subscribe on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2015/07/28/actual-advice-for-writing-poetry-plus-poem-utilizes-none-of-it-2/feed/0codygoughMarch 24, 2003: Satirical generic goth poem, plus class dynamicsIt’s like I just assumed my teacher wasn’t going to read thishttps://codygough.com/2015/07/26/its-like-i-assumed-my-teacher-wasnt-going-to-read-this/
https://codygough.com/2015/07/26/its-like-i-assumed-my-teacher-wasnt-going-to-read-this/#respondMon, 27 Jul 2015 04:23:46 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1412This post is kinda sorta the direct sequel to a real cliffhanger of a post, but while I’m sure you’re chomping at the bit to get to today’s (re: ~12 years ago’s) poetry, I’d like to first hastily explain what is about to happen in the three poems below:

The first “poem” is total garbage. It’s a reluctant apology for doing something I did not consider wrong; I don’t know exactly what it was, but I am clearly just being whiny.

The second “poem” is a continuation of the first, mostly because we’d just learned about Emily Dickinson, and apparently my major takeaways were “she capitalized seemingly random words” and “she used dashes seemingly at random,” leading my parodic slant to what we’ve got here (other than failure to communicate).

The third poem was probably something I wrote in 2 minutes to show to Brynn, my awesome/hilarious friend who sat by me in class and laughed at most of the things I said/did, which is a thing that made her (and frankly anyone else) worthy of my attention, as I was (am) a charismatic young teenager who was always fond of a little extra ego boost.

Hopefully that introduction will alleviate somewhat the horror art you are about to experience:

Transcription:

I must change things: My offensive apology for my offensive poetry; My confusing poetry about the enigmatic smile; My changing the meaning of the smile to redeem my apology; Everything comes full circle. I was just kidding about the contours; Hell, I don’t even know what “supple” means! But she—no, She— Is in my senior video group So I can’t let things “get weird” Like in Austin Powers 2. Did you notice that line 8 of this poem began with the word “But?” That is NOT grammatically sound, And yet many people do it anyway. But back to serenading my neo-feminist English group partner: I apologize—Again— For not really doing Anything—Save—For— Suddenly—trying To be—Emily Dickinson— Now she’s pissed again

Brynn’s hands are maleable I really like them Touching them makes me happy Even in church— But not like THAT

So there you have it: the day my creative genius died. Pack your bags, folks, show’s over.

…SAID NO ONE EVER

No but really, despite diamonds contained here, there’s quite a bit of rough. So I’d like to only talk about the few things from these poems that I don’t hate:

I love that I talk about “serenading my neo-feminist” classmate. I don’t know what my perceived definition of feminism was in 2003, but I’m sure it was outrageous and hilarious. I hope I find material that sheds more insight into this matter, although truth be told, I recall having only vague associations with the word “feminism” moreso than any perceptible opinions about it one way or the other.

Fun fact: I took an Intro to Women’s Studies class my freshman year of college. How blown is your mind right now?

The last line of the first poem is hilarious, as if I were reading it aloud to the class and managed to somehow twist a forced apology into something insulting. Even in the early days of the Internet, I was a hell of a troll!

I can’t remember if I’ve explained this before, but in one of our English classes, we saw a video of Maya Angelou speaking, in which she repeatedly invokes the word “poetry,” but it sounded very much like “POY-it-tree,” which my brilliant classmates and I of course thought was basically the funniest thing we had ever heard in our entire lives, because High School. You’ll see a lot of the word “POIETRY,” generally in all caps, in other high school writing of mine.

I can’t find the specific video clip of Maya Angelou doing this, but I’d love to post it if anyone can find it.

Brynn and I were always 100% platonic friends who mostly bonded with our lunch table group over Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, but we also went to the same church, so when we did the whole “peace be with you” bit, we’d shake each other hands. Shaking hands in church was generally my primary avenue for physical contact with the opposite sex throughout most of my life.

If this post sounds self-loathing, then it’s because it totally is, but what kind of an insight into the mind of a high schooler would this blog be if I only shared the stuff I was “proud” of? Half of the “fun” of this blog (for you, not for me) is sharing the cringe-worthy dumb stuff, trying to understand how and why it ever happened, and then sharing it with literally anyone on the entire planet capable of connecting to the Internet. I feel like a lot of the stuff I’ve shared in the last few years has been acceptable in quality and even sometimes insightful or profound in a certain way, so I suppose this post is my way of making up for that by being super vulnerable (“oh no, please don’t tease me about something I wrote when I wasn’t even legally allowed to smoke or have sex or immigrate to North Korea!”) and showing you that yes, even I am not always perfect. Just most of the time.

—

This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments 10+ years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and subscribe on WordPress to follow along!

You see, back on March 26, 2003, I apparently offended someone. This officially puts me Ahead of My Time, as these days, literally everyone is constantly offended all the time always, forever. In fact, I’m ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SURE that the previous sentence just offended someone. And my use of caps lock very likely triggered at least half a dozen people, who will now go blog about it on Tumblr and talk about how I oppressed them by thinking independent thoughts. Ha ha, just kidding—both you and I know that fewer than half a dozen people will ever actually read this.

To be clear, I was actually not even being that hyperbolic in the previous paragraph: in the image you are about to see below, I had to actually crop out half of my “apology,” because even MY APOLOGY would be too offensive for people in a hyper-politically-correct 2015, where Internet Peoples’ skin is about as thick as a sheet of tissue paper wrapped tightly around a blazing pile of firewood.

That having been said, here is the latter half of my apology, followed by a poem about… well, you’ll see (that’s what we call a “tease” in THE BIZ):

That time I felt the need to explain the concept and use of satire to my Creative Writing teacher, because High Schoolers

Transcript:

The point of my POIEMS was to write the words “fuckin(g)” and “dick/cock” as many times as possible while sarcastically representing the personification of racial & class tension in modern America, a portrait of some of the repressed topics of more primal, lower-class civilization.

No, seriously. I’m not kidding. I don’t think Heather believes me. Girls are weird! And see, I was satirical just then, too (a.k.a. sarcastic, only I used the wrong word). It’s impossible to interpret tone correctly when it’s in writing (particularly by me): insert something about the inadequacy of language here.

O enigmatic smile
So sweet;
I want to stroke its supple contours
I know not what “supple” means
But what it means
To me: Nothing.
Unlike that smile,
So rare, yet so common
A look intrigued only by enigma
Not myself…
necessarily…
But yet myself…
maybe…
How what ever the reason
I sure did like it
And will remember it until I forget it.

And now it’s time for your favorite segment, THE BREAKDOWN, starring Cody Gough, in which he makes completely unnecessary transitions, specifically calls them out, and then continues with his stupid post. Here we go with thoughts (or “Thotes,” depending on your level of investment into this web site):

I like my candid admission that I only wrote certain things because they allowed me curse profusely on paper in a class in high school. That’s what you get for sending me to public school, Mom and Dad!

“Heather” was a good friend in high school, and I actually interacted with her in Chicago many times while we both lived in the city. She’s awesome. However, she was 2003’s version of “one of those people” who has “empathy” for other human beings and chooses to be offended by certain things (re: vegan), so I’m sure that something I wrote or said in class bothered her, leading to something being said to the teacher. The omitted portion of this note is more of a justification than an apology for my actions, but it is so crass by today’s standards that I’d rather not publish it here.

I have no idea what I said in the first place that was upsetting, but I imagine it was something like “I like girls” or “happy hump day.”

I do find it very telling about my personality that apparently I had the same marked disdain for excessive political correctness and walking on eggshells that I do today. But let’s get to the poem now:

If I had to guess, I’d say that I saw someone’s smile, would have described it as “enigmatic,” and then proceeded to launch into a ridiculous tangent about the word “supple,” despite it not really having anything to do with the smile or what I thought about it.

“Not myself… necessarily… / But yet myself… maybe…” is probably based on a thought that the smile reminded me of my own smile in some way; however, the prose I chose to Bose® speakers into your heart is parodic at best, read as if I were deeply exploring some incredibly profound insight into whether my and her souls were somehow bound together and I saw a blurring of identities from some grand cosmic scale.

I actually really like the end of the poem, which, after leveraging verbiage that suggested some sort of delve into the deep spiritual meaning of identity, immediately pretty much says “jk, nvm, gg” and peace outs of the poem with a disinterested shrug.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

…and the second part will be covered in my next post.

—

This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments 10+ years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and subscribe on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2015/07/13/poetry-about-enigmatic-smiles-and-offending-everyone/feed/2codygoughMarch 26, 2003: Rationalizing my offensive poetryWhy I’m not going to see the new Godzilla moviehttps://codygough.com/2014/05/25/why-im-not-going-to-see-the-new-godzilla-movie/
https://codygough.com/2014/05/25/why-im-not-going-to-see-the-new-godzilla-movie/#respondSun, 25 May 2014 17:28:17 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1347The new Godzilla movie is fine or whatever. I guess a bunch of people are going to see it or have already seen it, but I am not one of those people.

See, a lot of kids these days forget that TriStar Pictures released a Godzilla movie in 1998. A lot of people in general also seem to forget that TriStar Pictures is a thing that exists. In fact, I didn’t know that fact until I looked it up on Wikipedia, but that’s beside the point.

The 1998 Godzilla movie had something that this Godzilla movie does NOT have, and I think we all know exactly what I’m talking about:

Yeah, that’s right: PUFF DADDY.

Puff Daddy composed a song for the 1998 film that was so good, even Jimmy Page later covered it with Led Zeppelin. That’s some kind of influential! And the music video. THAT MUSIC VIDEO.

Let me explain something to you: when Puff Daddy–and not P. Diddy, I’d like to point out–wears a leather jacket and sunglasses AT NIGHT and raps while CGI explosions are rocking his face, you have basically reached the pinnacle of cinema; nay, the pinnacle of all entertainment.

The lyrics also offer a poetic insight into the culture and struggles of a pre-9/11 world. I know you probably just watched the music video at least half a dozen times, but now prepare for your mind to be even further blown by the raw, uncut, even more emotional version:

From the very outset of the song, you know you’re in for a journey of legendary proportions. Does the new Godzilla movie do anything like that? I doubt it. And it only gets deeper from there:

You said to trust youYou’d never hurt meNow I’m disgustedSince then adjustedCertainly you fooled meRidiculed meLeft me hangingNow shit’s boomerangingRight back at you

Think about it: we’ve all been there. These lyrics are relevant to all of us, telling the story of someone whose trust was betrayed, but whose aggressor earned the comeuppance (s)he deserved. Karma is an ancient concept, and yet it is presented so clearly and artistically here, it’s unbelievable. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

Fuck my enemiesFuck my foesDamn these hoes

As anger reaches a boiling point, Puff Daddy himself can’t help but lash out. This may as well be written by Eminem or another lyrical artist. I am literally speechless at this point. The raw emotion is arresting; the tension, palpable.

Then, Puff Daddy says a bunch of other words, and it’s really great. But look, I’m not here to write an in-depth analysis of the song; I think that, like all good songs, the analysis writes itself. In the words of the poet Robert Frost: “And would suffice.”

Now, some critics may suggest that the new Godzilla movie is better than the 1998 masterpiece because Walter White is in it. And while he is usually the one who knocks, I must say that Puff Daddy likely has even more experience dealing drugs than Walter does. I mean, is Jesse even in the new Godzilla movie? No. That’s like making a Batman movie without Robin: it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Who would watch something like that? Literally nobody.

According to Metacritic, the new Godzilla movie has a 62, and the 1998 Godzilla has a 32. Some may point to these figures as evidence that the new Godzilla movie is better than the old one, but you know what? People are dumb. And they should shut up. And I think that’s a pretty hard case to argue against.

If you’re still not convinced, then I present to you the best scene in movie history:

DAT ACTING.

In conclusion, the 1998 Godzilla movie is an overlooked masterpiece, not this flaming pile of garbage that touts such meaningless accomplishments as being “critically acclaimed” and “not terrible.” Go watch the 16-year-old masterpiece in its entirety, and you, too, may see the light.

I’ve been hesitant to write anything here for a long time now because I’m frankly a better speaker than I am a writer. I’ve always been the kind of guy who wants to exclusively present his “best” work. In college, I had a journalism class where we had to write one article every week; I wrote six over the course of the fifteen-week semester (for those keeping track: six is not fifteen). On the weeks when I didn’t submit an article, it wasn’t out of apathy or laziness – it was out of the knowledge that I didn’t have anything great to write about. So why do it?

Regardless, here I am, and here’s why: this is the one-year anniversary of my web site existing. Hurray! My first and last name, plus a dot com. Now there’s something exciting. The email I received informing me of my auto-renewal of this domain inspired me to actually, well, use it, so here we are. And for the record, I really hate how often I’m using Italics, but I’m going to soldier on and keep writing anyway. For you.

My “big idea” for this site was the 10-year Idea Reunion, which I thought was a great idea. I loved it. I got excited about doing it. I talked to people about it. But then… well, I’m not going to blame anyone, but someone very close to me actively discouraged the project, apparently thinking it was stupid. I let that person get to me, and the project sadly kinda died.

I was also going to host my “secondary” podcast here. I host the Unqualified Gamers podcast with my life-long friend Jon, and that’s been a blast. However, I also used to co-host this other, far inferior podcast, and this site was to be the main hub for all that podcast’s content. I’m frankly glad it went away, but that left a bit of a hole here.

So for the last several months, my titular domain name (did I use that correctly?) has essentially been home to Unqualified Gamers, and that’s about it.

But! 2014!

I want to resume the 10-year reunion, even if it isn’t technically 10 years old anymore. I hope to begin posting my old writings once a week, on Thursdays, specifically so I can shamelessly utilize #ThrowbackThursdays in my hashtags. I also want to start embedding YouTube videos here, now that I live alone and have a setup that will allow me to shoot my own vlogs or whatever you want to call them. So, there’s that.

And in terms of less “regular” content, I want to finally feature a section that serves the secondary purpose of being a talent page. I do have an IMDB profile, but it’s sparse at best, and I don’t feel like ponying up $15 for a month of IMDB Pro just so I can add a freaking picture of myself (which is supposedly a free feature anyway, by the way).

In the mean time, of course, you can visit my Facebook fan page for pretty much all that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but I’d like to get a completed acting resume on here, since I do happen to have one.

So there you go. Mostly useless information, but I wanted to say, I dunno, SOMETHING about this site. Who pays for his own web site and then just sits around not really touching it? Not me, anymore. I hope.

I know it’s only November, but here’s to 2014. I’ll talk to you again soon. Maybe.

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/11/12/one-year-later-cody-gough-retrospective-of-sorts/feed/0codygoughViet-Momhttps://codygough.com/2013/04/04/viet-mom-a-stupid-story-idea-plus-learn-about-cody-gough/
https://codygough.com/2013/04/04/viet-mom-a-stupid-story-idea-plus-learn-about-cody-gough/#respondThu, 04 Apr 2013 06:06:00 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1156Welcome to CodyGough.com! This may be your first visit, because it’s my birthday, and I’m using the powers of Facebook to trick people into visiting promote my web site. Welcome, and enjoy. I host episodes of Unqualified: A Video Game Podcast here, as well as post stories and poems that are ten years old. I will eventually do more stuff, but I wanted to start simple in 2013.

With that out of the way: exactly 10 years ago, I had an idea. Inspiration like you would never expect. In addition to incredibly artistic drawings of characters from Super Smash Brothers: Melee, I came up with the premise to a story of epic proportions. Observe!

A CHILLING TALE INDEED.

Transcript:

VIET-MOM
The chilling tale of one Asian woman who bore an entire nation, only to one day be betrayed by her own uterus. Witness the gripping re-enactment of one pedophiliac cannibal’s quest for her “golden children” through the exotic jungles of such countries that start with the letter “T” as Tahiti, Tijuana, and Taiwan. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll cry some more, as the journey takes you through four hundred years of tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire.

A few things:

Yes, I know I didn’t originally write “Asian,” but the word I DID use wasn’t politically incorrect yet when I wrote it. So sue my 10-years-ago-self. I actually am sorry if that offended you, though… just keep in mind, this was written by a high schooler in a different time. That’s all.

I’m pretty sure that tragedy, comedy, romance and satire were like, the 4 types of stories we studied in English class. We had also watched Apocalypse Now in class, which I’m sure inspired this entire poem.

I have no idea where Tahiti is. And I hate myself for ending the previous sentence in a preposition. But at least now I’ve shown that I did learn something in school, so I’ll call that a win.

Look, I never said that none of my stuff would be offensive (DAMN YOU, DOUBLE NEGATIVES), so please keep in mind that a high schooler wrote this stuff and that the “big picture” of my entire 10-year project is to entertain. Sometimes that includes shaking your head in my general direction. Other times, that means seeing my INCREDIBLY ARTISTIC ARTISTRY, especially applied to video games.

Anyway, I went on a kind of sabbatical from my web site in March, but you can look forward to seeing a lot more of my high school genius in April. Thanks for visiting! I hope you enjoy my little project and decide to check out other parts of my site, and more importantly, I hope I can entertain you again soon, because I honestly think making people smile is why I was put on God’s Green Earth®… even if only because I have no other real skills.

Speaking of earth, I like how on my Apple keyboard, I can simply type Option+R to make the ® symbol, but on my Windows 8 laptop, I have to type Alt+0174. HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE

—–
This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/04/04/viet-mom-a-stupid-story-idea-plus-learn-about-cody-gough/feed/0codygoughA CHILLING TALE INDEED.Poem: The Konami Codehttps://codygough.com/2013/04/03/poem-the-konami-code/
https://codygough.com/2013/04/03/poem-the-konami-code/#respondThu, 04 Apr 2013 04:33:00 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1163If you want to test someone to find out if (s)he is a “real” gamer, then ask about the Konami Code. It’s a cheat code used in several Konami games, but for whatever reason, it became so iconic that other video games also started to utilize it, and has become so prevalent in pop culture that ESPN, Facebook, and Google have featured it in Easter Eggs on their web sites. It’s kind of a big deal.

The Konami Code, by the way, is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, usually followed by start or select and then start. I did that from memory. Be impressed… or don’t, since I just talked about how familiar every gamer should be with it.

Anyway, I wrote a poem about it. Please enjoy it.

I only had to use three continues before finishing this poem!! … which… doesn’t even make sense

Transcript:

Look at you!
Look at me
Look at you
Looking at nothing
BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST?
What’s it to you,
Super nerd?
I don’t think so—
Not this time—
So let me look around,
Look inside,
Pretend I believe in your fictional lies!
I’m gonna flip,
Iron Will;
Shoot to thrill, play to kill!
Stolen line just like the rest,
Unoriginality’s always been the best,
So do it sideways, up,
Up, down, down,
Left, right, left, right,
B, A, B, A,
Start the fight
Cause I’m gonna win,
Your chance was gone when I turned you on,
And now you’re gone, worse off than Pong,
Made obsolete by myself the 1337,
And when you scream I flip the switch
And live to fight another day.
Game Over, bitch.

Analysis:

This is awful.

Yes, I realize it’s not really about Konami. Or the Konami Code. Or anything.

“1337” is pronounced “leet” (like “elite,” but without the “e”), in case you aren’t nerdy enough to immediately realize that.

“And live to fight another day” is what the major bad guys (Bebop, Rocksteady, The Shredder, Krang) yelled all the time in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series. So yes, that’s stolen, too.

This… wow, this is awful.

I hope you were mildly entertained by this. Just remember: you can write better poetry than me. Sometimes I write decent stuff, but with this, I have officially set the bar so low, you can’t possibly do much worse. I’m gonna go punch the Konami Code into a controller for a while now.

—–
This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/04/03/poem-the-konami-code/feed/0codygoughI only had to use three continues before finishing this poem!! ... which... doesn't even make senseA poem I can’t really explainhttps://codygough.com/2013/03/10/a-serious-poem-i-cant-explain-at-all/
https://codygough.com/2013/03/10/a-serious-poem-i-cant-explain-at-all/#respondMon, 11 Mar 2013 01:15:23 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1101Fair warning: I have no idea what motivated this poem. It includes a lot of vocabulary words and is kind of emo, at least for me. So good luck getting through it:

Holy vocabulary, Batman

Transcript:

I cry, enraged;
Interneccine, intractable, intolerable
Living a lie because the truth hurts
The truth, just as myself:
Intangible, impractible, intolerable
Just as hard to reach as
An echo in a cave
But deep within they lie
Investigate, intrude after all
Invincible You, Invidious You,
Inviolate Me, Invisible Me;
Interjected by hope.
By love – But for Whom?
Insanity for me
As if I could even tell
It interrupts the thoughts I can’t understand
They intrude, they intrude,
But into nothing at all.
People want me,
People need me,
But they don’t see me
So do they use me?
Symbiotic
People use people
And in the end, enraged,
I cry.

A few things:

The second line roughly translates to “murderous, obstinate, intolerable.” Later on, “impractible” isn’t a real word, “invidious” means “hateful,” and “inviolate” means “unharmed.”

I think the tone of the poem is too dark for me to have been simply messing around with alliteration, as I’ve done in previous poems, unless I was simply too angry while writing this angry poem to heed the English language.

“An echo in a cave” refers directly to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, although I don’t necessarily understand the context.

I must have had a bad day or something when I wrote this. Do you see any universal truths in this poem? Any statements about human nature? It’s hard for me to look at any of my old poetry objectively and try to read it out of context, which is both problematic for presenting my old works to the general public, and frustrating because maybe that’s now really the point.

This poem really sticks out to me because it isn’t sarcastic or irreverent, but it’s also really abstract compared to a lot of my other stuff. Like, generally, I see something and think to myself “okay, I get where that came from,” but this one is just like… totally out of left field. I hope you find some enjoyment out of it, because I can’t find much value in terms of poetry or reminiscence.

—–
This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

Teacher: Okay class, you all have to write a poem today, the subject of which must be something you are passionate about.
Me: Does that include video games?
Teacher: Why yes, Cody, it certainly does! And be sure to include at least one writing technique, such as alliteration, in the poem.
Me: How about I include alliteration, but instead of giving it any context whatsoever, I just write a bunch of words in a row that start with the same letter but lack any coherent or logical flow?
Teacher: That sounds splendid! Please also do that with a part of speech as well, such as prepositions or linking verbs.
Me: I will do so happily, and then gallivant into the sunset!
Teacher: You didn’t even use that word correctly, but who cares? Go write your terrible poem!

That basically is what must have happened, because Science®. Anyway, here’s the result of this conversation:

Characters all around
25 all around,
Colorful characters quite abound
Every few and every pair
Have some sort of reason to be fighting there
Cartoonish they seem, yet I don’t quite care
It keeps things clean—for the Kids.Contacts cascading, namecalling renaming
The therapeutic Theremin of Thespian thinking
A thing-in-itself
Which no-one seems to be seeingSmelling the sweat, the substance of strife
Illiterate critics, illegitimate gimmicks,
Sucking the life out of
Into out of around near far abound
Train of thought
Derailed to hell
Away from the housetop,
Away from the roof
Now dash away, dash away…
Dash away all.

Ten years after writing this poem, I can explain almost every thought that went through my head. I have no specific recollection of writing it, but here’s how each part of this happened:

I started writing about Smash Brothers. “25 characters” are in Smash Brothers: Melee, and the violence in the game is irrefutably “cartoonish” to maintain a K-A rating (Kids to Adult), which is the video game equivalent of being rated PG.

I must have heard the word “theremin” somewhere and couldn’t think of anything else to write in Line 9, so I just grabbed a Thesaurus (or used any “th” words I could recall) and stuck them together incoherently, very likely thinking “I can get away with anything, it’s poetry” at the time.

Line 13, “Illiterate critics, illegitimate gimmicks” undoubtedly refers to video game critics who invent facts to further their own political agendas (i.e. Jack Thompson, who at the time was sadly receiving media coverage) as I start to “zoom out” from Smash Brothers itself and start to examine the overall perception of it, and gaming.

After writing Line 14, “Sucking the life out of,” I couldn’t think of what to write, so I just wrote a chain of prepositions, which were HUGE in the Latin class I was also taking at the time. I directly admit this in Line 16 when I say “Train of thought,” and concede that I couldn’t think of a coherent follow-up in Line 17: “Derailed to hell.”

Lines 18 through the end are self-explanatory.

Is it frightening that I can deconstruct my own ten-year-old poem as specifically as I did? Honestly, you tell me. I like to think that some things never change, and that I don’t think that’s a bad thing. My writing was also pretty transparent, at least at the time, and at least to me.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this completely ridiculous poem! Looking ahead, it appears that I won’t have a great deal of notes/poems/stories for the next 10 days, but please stay tuned and there will be plenty more for you to analyze, criticize, or ignore soon!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/28/poem-starring-alliteration-prepositions-super-smash-brothers-melee/feed/2codygoughA poem featuring forced alliteration, excessive prepositions, and Super Smash Brothers: MeleeA Poem: “Bad Poetry Gone Worse”https://codygough.com/2013/02/26/poetry-assignment-poem-about-romantic-embrace/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/26/poetry-assignment-poem-about-romantic-embrace/#respondWed, 27 Feb 2013 00:19:55 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1087AN ASSIGNMENT! Looks like we had homework in my creative writing class. And this also looks like a semi-serious attempt at a semi-serious poem. I’m going to post the transcript first, and THEN an image of the poem, so that you can read it (if you’d like) without my teacher’s commentary first.

Just as before, I’m reluctant to post one of my actual serious attempts at poetry, because who wants to feel vulnerable ever? And yet I must, not only to grow as an artist, but because I wrote this ten years ago and really have no business feeling self-conscious about it in the first place. So here you go:

Bad Poetry Gone Worse

Warmth and safety –
Temporary, not contemporary –
Brought about by softly stroking,
Holding close who means the most,
To feel warmth and safety.

A delicate caress, and a moment trapped in time
Forever – an eternity – can never last that long
The feeling held, the moment constant,
Infinity within a single embrace
Yet no time, no numbers, no measurements
Can quantify my Happiness.

Supporting Me, supporting You
Like two, like one; like one, like two;
Together at last, together forever
Together forever… but only for a moment.

One last look one last sigh
One last hug at the end of the night
One last peck – unless we’re just Friends –
One last grin as if keeping things quiet
One last touch to ensure that She’s there
One last heartbeat—
The everlasting hug… Gone.

Don’t let the title fool you; it’s not actually that bad. Maybe.

A few things:

We studied Emily Dickinson quite extensively in English class; this led to a substantial use of “random” capitalization in my poetry, often somewhat mockingly. In this case, however, it looks like my teacher (and I, ten years later) was pleased with how I used it.

I can’t decide whether I agree with my inclusion the line “Temporary, not contemporary” that my teacher circled. It kind of doesn’t fit, but I feel like there’s a case for it. Thoughts?

This poem doesn’t suck, so that’s kinda cool, right?

I wasn’t what you would call “good” at things like “turning in assignments on time,” so I’m sure the check with “-20%” at the top of the page means that I turned in my assignment late. Oh well, I still graduated!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/26/poetry-assignment-poem-about-romantic-embrace/feed/0codygoughDon't let the title fool you: it's not actually that bad. Maybe.Poetry about hell… and Roy from Smash Brothershttps://codygough.com/2013/02/20/poetry-about-hell-and-roy-from-super-smash-brothers-melee/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/20/poetry-about-hell-and-roy-from-super-smash-brothers-melee/#respondWed, 20 Feb 2013 22:24:44 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1074I’m not sure how or why this happened, but apparently I penned a few poems about hell. The first poem is my “main” hell poem, followed by a poem that is about both hell and Roy from Super Smash Brothers: Melee, equally. Let’s see how dark my high school mind could get:

A poem about hell, followed by a poem about hell and Roy from Super Smash Brothers: Melee

Transcript:The descent.Through the cloud;Off a cliff;Into the needles—Of a blackberry bush.The voice of deathWhirring in your headThe descent into hell—You know that you’re dead.The same from all placesThe distance of the journey isFor central the location beOf Auburn’s room 296.

Wow… talk about anticlimax. I’m guessing that my creative writing class met in room 296. Anyway, that poem is followed by a rough draft of the next poem. Moving along, here is that second poem:

Roy is a character from Super Smash Brothers: Melee (originally from the Fire Emblem video game series), and I never liked him. His sword often bursts into the flame in the game, so I liked to call him things like “flaming idiot” and “flaming loser.” At the time, “to flame” someone meant “to insult” someone; I often had “flame wars” with my friend Captain, who of course LOVED Roy.

The imagery of tightly gripped hands could apply to Roy’s very heavy in-game sword, but it ends up implying the grip used to hold a controller. This gives the Smash Brothers poem actual poetic validity, which both annoys and pleases me.

I wonder why I specified “blackberry bush” in my first poem?

I like that my seemingly serious attempt at a poem about death/hell devolved into a stupid comment about my high school creative writing classroom, but my stupid anecdotal poem about a character I hated in Smash Brothers resulted in the creation of some actual legitimate poetry.

I’ve always been told that the best material comes from your passions. I was VERY passionate about Smash Brothers in high school (and college… and now), so I guess it makes sense that some semblance of creativity would have come out of me when writing about Roy.

…still feels totally ridiculous, though.

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/20/poetry-about-hell-and-roy-from-super-smash-brothers-melee/feed/0codygoughA poem about hell, followed by two poems about hell and Roy from Super Smash Brothers: BrawlAphorisms!https://codygough.com/2013/02/19/famous-aphorisms/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/19/famous-aphorisms/#respondWed, 20 Feb 2013 04:59:27 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1070In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, an aphorism is kind of like a proverb. You know, stuff like “patience is a virtue,” “stupid is as stupid does,” and others like that. Here is a list of aphorisms that I wrote:

Can you spot the not-so-famous one I included?

I didn’t invent any of these, but here are my favorites:
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion.”
“Condoms don’t protect the heart.”
“Candy is dandy – liquor is quicker.”

And, of course, the one I slipped in from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. But I’ll leave that one up to YOU to identify (if you can read my high school handwriting, of course).

So if I didn’t create anything original, then why am I posting this? As a precursor to tomorrow’s poetry, of course! Stay tuned.

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/19/famous-aphorisms/feed/0codygoughCan you spot the not-so-famous one I included?Greek philosophy and a poem about semicolonshttps://codygough.com/2013/02/18/greekphilosophy-and-poetry-poem-about-semicolons/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/18/greekphilosophy-and-poetry-poem-about-semicolons/#commentsMon, 18 Feb 2013 06:51:48 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1059Whether or not you like my (10-year-old) poetry, you will likely find something you enjoy in this post! That’s because the top half of my page of notes contains timeless quotes about life from Greek philosophers, transcribed here:

“Actions always planned are never completed.” -Democritus
“Old men were once young, but it is uncertain if young men will reach old age.” -Democritus
“The path up and down is one and the same.” -Heraclitus
“Nature likes to hide itself.” -Heraclitus
“The world is change; life is opinion.” -Democritus
“Theraclitus said that a man’s character is his fate.” -Stabeus (?)
“[Parmenides] speaks of perceiving and thinking as the same thing.” -Theophrastus
“All things were together. The mind came and arranged them.” -Anaxagoras
“Worlds are altered rather than destroyed.” -Democritus
“Dark and light, bad and good, are not different, but are one and the same.” -Heraclitus

Whoa, we’re starting to get deep, aren’t we? I have no clue how these quotes tied in with the poem I wrote below them (if at all); nonetheless, here it is, transcription following the image:

Top half: the ideas of great philosophers. Bottom half: my poem about semicolons.

Transcript:Poor, deprived semicolon
There isn’t even punctuation in Latin
So then, why, Anaxagoras?
The mind came,
Arranged everything
So then, why?
Punctuation, arranged for granted?
Taken for granted?
Taken at all?
The mind needs a mean
By which it can arrange;
How, then,
Is the semicolon neglected?
Rejected?
Disrespected?
Why, Anaxagoras? Why?
…why?

A few things:

Did Anaxagoras invent written language? No[t that I can find using Google]. Does my poem suggest this? Yes. Do I know what to make of this discrepancy? Hell no.

For the uninitiated, Anaxagoras was a Greek philosopher best known for having a totally badass name.

I took a Latin class my senior year of high school, and that is directly responsible for my use of the phrase “by which,” as we used a LOT of prepositions in that class. As a result, we learned to write by means of many prepositions (see what I did there?).

I used to LOVE writing semicolons in high school and college, but lately I’ve become a huge fan of using colons. Not just to introduce lists, mind you; my use of colons is much more advanced than that. Of course, right now I can’t think of how I could purposely write a sentence to utilize a semicolon, but that just means you’ll have to keep checking my web site for more updates so you can spot ’em when I write them!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/18/greekphilosophy-and-poetry-poem-about-semicolons/feed/1codygoughTop half: the ideas of great philosophers. Bottom half: my poem about semicolons.An abstract poemhttps://codygough.com/2013/02/06/an-abstract-poem-by-cody-gough/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/06/an-abstract-poem-by-cody-gough/#respondWed, 06 Feb 2013 22:31:03 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=622I have no back story on this poem other than the obvious fact that I wrote it ten years ago today. Let’s see what I devised:

This is a bit more abstract than my other high school poetry

Transcript:Antithetical,
Monkey thought.
Thetical,
Jerk thought.
The greedy discussion
Blood red checks to get in
Stained with pain,
Written in vain
Thoughtful thinking
Never ceasing
Until it do.

I can’t say much about this poem other than “until it do” is a blatant misuse of correct grammar. Some of my classmates in certain high school classes didn’t talk very goodly, so I’m sure they inspired that line. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about this. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/06/an-abstract-poem-by-cody-gough/feed/0codygoughThis is a bit more abstract than my other high school poetryA really good poem with sexual undertoneshttps://codygough.com/2013/02/05/a-really-good-poem-with-sexual-undertones-of-sex/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/05/a-really-good-poem-with-sexual-undertones-of-sex/#respondWed, 06 Feb 2013 03:45:59 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=617There’s a bunch of crap on this page that you can probably ignore, followed by a poem that I actually kind of like a lot. More specifically, the top part of the page is probably some sort of word association, as I wrote about memories like “Forest City Invitational, senior year” (a cross country meet I ran) and “Picking up Dorothy and spinning her around” (I played the Scarecrow in “The Wiz”), and the middle part of the page looks like some disjointed stream-of-consciousness-type writing.

I’m only going to transcribe the poem that follows those thoughts, however, because frankly, I think it’s actually worth reading:

Transcript:Rest
Relaxation
Muscles loosened
Body stopped
Staring at the closet, the closet staring back at me
One last movement – cuddling
One last thought – sex
One last sigh –
Finally.

It has pretty strong implications, but it’s also open to interpretation. You could even say that it’s… poetic. Maybe my creative writing teacher got to me after all. I just hope this poem was as good for you as it was for me (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/05/a-really-good-poem-with-sexual-undertones-of-sex/feed/0codygoughFebruary 5, 2003: PoemWriting exercise: writing a poem using simileshttps://codygough.com/2013/02/04/writing-exercise-writing-a-poem-using-similes/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/04/writing-exercise-writing-a-poem-using-similes/#respondMon, 04 Feb 2013 14:05:35 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=608We did a fun little writing exercise in class on February 4, in which we completed some sentences to create similes. I feel like I wrote some pretty cool similes! But then, we were supposed to use them as an inspiration for a poem. Let’s see what I accomplished:

This poem uses a lot of similes! Which goes to show that a poem that uses a lot of similes… is still terrible, if it’s an awful poem.

Transcript:

Pouring coffee down his throat
As if he hadn’t had a drink since last night,
The honor walked down the plank
Towards the ring
Towards his title shot
For the WWE Undisputed Championship
The puffy clouds in his glass of wine
—Last night—
Had been like the jagged clouds in his opponent’s bag of cocaine
The clouds rolling like dice out of a cup
Like his mother’s fist did to his face last night
And as the honor saw the hydrochloric acid at ringside
He knew it could solve his greatest problem:
Zombies.

A few things:

This is terrible… except for the last line.

I don’t know what an “honor” is, in this context. Obviously I know what honor is, but my use of the word here baffles me. It’s not capitalized, so it’s not a judge… any ideas?

At least it’s coherent?

This just goes to show that there’s more to writing than just using literary devices. I think I probably took the assignment too literally, but I came up with something that at least told a coherent story, so… it could’ve been worse? Either way, let’s hope it doesn’t get much worse.

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” project, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/04/writing-exercise-writing-a-poem-using-similes/feed/0codygoughThis poem uses a lot of similes! Which goes to show that a poem that uses a lot of similes... is still crap, if it's a terrible poem.The Super Bowl: Raiders and Buccaneers vs. 49ers and Ravenshttps://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/#respondSun, 03 Feb 2013 18:15:01 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=604I’m not excited about Super Bowl XLVII. I don’t really follow football other than watching the Packers play, and I usually watch all the best Super Bowl commercials online before they air.

Apparently, I wasn’t really interested in the Super Bowl ten years ago, either. The following is a printed out page from my web site, featuring a post that I wrote on January 27, 2003 – the day after Super Bowl XXXVII. I printed out this page and turned it in to my creative writing teacher, since we were required to write outside of class.

it appears that my teacher only had one comment, and that was to underline a phrase that I wrote that was not politically correct. I hope I don’t offend anyone with it, but frankly, I didn’t remember the name of the guy I referenced, so I wrote what I wrote. But I do think he’s awesome and rocks as a commentator. More or less politically incorrect in 2013? I don’t know. Just please try not to freak out: remember, I wrote this when I was 17.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on Super Bowl XXXVII (expletives deleted, for the most part):

I apologize for the political incorrectness of the underlined phrase… but I really DO like that one African-American NFL commentator, he’s awesome!

A few things:

“Buccaneers” and “Raiders” ARE both rejected versions of the word “Pirate.” I bet that would be all over the Internet if it happened today.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t so bad these days. No more hate!

I still don’t like anti-drug commercials, but at least they’re less patronizing than they were ten years ago.

I’d never heard of Sting prior to this Super Bowl. After seeing the halftime show, I wish I had still never heard of him.

It’s funny that my teacher took exception to calling that one African-American commentator “that black guy” but she had no problem with me calling Terry Bradshaw “that pissed off old redneck.” Also, what is that guy’s name?!

“It made me miss Independence Day on FOX” is one of my favorite lines I have ever written.

To this day, I STILL think it’s incredibly bizarre that the Patriots won the first Super Bowl after 9/11.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip down Super Bowl lane! I frankly don’t care who wins today, and I’ll be doing a radio show during the game anyway. Maybe I’ll watch next year.

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/feed/0codygoughI apologize for the political incorrectness of the underlined phrase... but I really DO like that one African-American NFL commentator, he's awesome!Writing exercise: writing similes and completing sentences, 2003 vs. 2013https://codygough.com/2013/02/02/writing-similes-and-completing-sentences-writing-exercise/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/02/writing-similes-and-completing-sentences-writing-exercise/#commentsSat, 02 Feb 2013 21:15:05 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=598Yay, a writing exercise! My creative writing teacher provided phrases ending with “is/are like…” or “as if…” and we had to finish the sentence, thus forming a simile (although it looks like some of these are just sentences needing completion, but close enough). We were giving this exercise on February 4, but I’m posting it on February 2 because we then used these similes as inspiration to write a poem, and I plan to post the poem on February 4.

I’m going to actually do this exercise, meaning that I will type all of her “set-up” phrases and complete them on my own. Then, I will supply my original 2003 answer, and then we can all compare. And please note that no, not all of these will end up being “similes” strictly by definition. Let’s do it:

A writing exercise for writing similes. Try it out!

Similes:

A spider on an old man’s beard is like…2013: a scorpion in a tumbleweed.2003: a woman in an older man’s bed.

The oars on a boat rowed as if…2013: they had no other purpose.2003: pushing away an annoying little brat.

Nothing was the same now that it was…2013: Friday.2003: Halloween.

The Wino took to coma like…2013: a Russian going to bed.2003: a student after school.

The dice rolled out of the cup toward Len like…2013: an avalanche of rocks spewing from the peak of a mountain.2003: his mother’s fist did last night.

A child in _____ is like a _____ in _____2013: A child in peril is like a princess in the dungeon.2003: A child in need is like a stripper in jail.

Puffy clouds in your glass of wine are like…2013: balls of lava in a lava lamp.2003: jagged clouds in your bag of cocaine.

A _____ is like muscles stretched taut over bone2013: canvas2003: hug

The fog plumed through the gunshot holes in the train windows like…2013: a creepy pedophile sneaking into an elementary school.2003: water pours out of Daffy Duck after Elmer Fudd shoots him.

The grey honor (honor?) walked up the satin plank as if…2013: he were going to receive a medal for exceptional swordsmanship.2003: on his way to the ring for a shot at the WWE Undisputed Championship.

Cancelled checks in the abandoned boat seemed…2013: like an impractical waste of space.2003: almost as confusing as this awful analogy.

If I should wake before I die…2013: then I should celebrate life.2003: put me back to sleep with your warmth.

Illanah poured coffee down her throat as if…2013: she were a robot that needed oil to continue to function.2003: she hadn’t had a drink since last night.

Up is like down when…2013: you’re in Dante’s Inferno.2003: you’re completely insane.

You mine rocks from a quarry. What you get from a quandary is…2013: a lot more difficult to understand.2003: able to rock your mineshaft. (lol)

Marlene dangled the Parson from the question as if…2013: I have any idea what a Parson is. (and yes, I know I ended that with a preposition)2003: she actually made sense.

She held her life in her own hands as if it were…2013: a chip on a roulette table, optimistically willing to let its value be determined by the arbitrary spin of a wheel.2003: a feather on a windy day.

“No, no, a thousand times no!” he said, his hand…2013: balling into a fist and preparing to strike.2003: wrapping more tightly around her waist to keep her close.

The solution was hydrochloric acid; the problem was, therefore…2013: finding a plastic container that could contain it without dissolving. (Thanks, Breaking Bad)2003: zombies.

Love is to open sky as loathing is to…2013: being tightly bound and unable to move, barely able to breathe.2003: cuddly rabbits and teddy bears.

A few things:

Why so many drug and alcohol references? I was in high school!

Here’s your homework: please explain to me how a child in need is like a stripper in jail.

I was struck by the similarity in my responses for She held her life in her own hands as if it were…; in both of my responses, “she” left her life completely open to chance, leaving fate to decide its outcome. Conversely, my responses to the very next entry, “No, no, a thousand times no!” he said, his hand…, were polar opposites, one ending in a fist and the other ending in an embrace.

It appears that over time, people are capable of changing in some ways, but not others. Or perhaps as a writer, inspiration strikes differently at different times? Perhaps some writers have killed off characters in some drafts, but saved them in others. I guess there’s only one way for me to further explore this theory: write more!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” project, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

In a culture over-saturated with irony, it’s hard to say something serious and leave yourself vulnerable to criticism, judgment, or even simple interpretation. That’s why I’m at least a bit reluctant to post this poem, because although I did indeed write it ten years ago, it’s strikingly devoid of the irreverence typical of the rest of my work. Was my teacher somehow successful in motivating me to actually attempt a serious poem?

Fortunately, the fact that I wrote this poem ten years ago is akin to a famous actor posting a video of the commercial he did for a local insurance company in Kansas when he was 16, so let’s face it: I can’t be too sensitive about any feedback I receive from anyone. So without further ado, let’s see if I was able to muster any poetic talent after my first couple weeks of a creative writing class (note that my actual poem attempt appears at the bottom half of the page):

The top half is either a rough draft, or random notes… there’s really no way to tell. Either way, feel free to ignore it!

“Lifestream” is a Final Fantasy VII reference, and knowing me, I used “Hardcore” in the context of professional wrestling. So I guess I did go a LITTLE “inside” with this poem.

I feel like this poem would be awesome at a beat poetry open mic, probably because it doesn’t have an obnoxiously generic rhyming scheme.

Is this perhaps some kind of analogy for the life of a video game character?

You know what’s weird? I wanted to write some commentary on the poem, so I scrolled up to read it. And seeing it written on a blank white screen in sans serif, Italicized font… well, it made it un-readable to me. Am I totally crazy or what? But seriously, I feel like I can only read this in its original hand-written form, or I’m not able to really “get into it.”

Anyway, what do you think? Is this any “good” or is it just mindless high school drivel? I took the creative writing class to learn how to be more poetic (whatever that means), but I think that at the conclusion of the class, I never really learned whether I was any good at it or if I just got better at feeling like I knew what I was doing. Does that even make sense? Probably not. But I’m going with it anyway.

Clearly, I need to practice writing some more… good thing I’ve got this web site! Thanks for joining me for the ride. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and please share my project with anyone you think may be interested. More posts to come soon!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/30/cody-apparently-attempts-to-write-a-legitimate-poem/feed/4codygoughThe top half is either a rough draft, or random notes... there's really no way to tell.Free-flowing thoughts of a high schoolerhttps://codygough.com/2013/01/27/free-flowing-thoughts-of-a-17-year-old-high-school-senior/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/27/free-flowing-thoughts-of-a-17-year-old-high-school-senior/#respondSun, 27 Jan 2013 20:53:22 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=570And now for something completely different!

Apparently, we listened to music in class while writing down a free-flowing stream of thought. I don’t remember what music was playing, but that kind of makes this page of notes more awesome; in fact, go ahead and try to imagine what kind of music I was hearing at the time I wrote this: I’d love to hear your theories!

Actually, I’m very interested in whether you find this interesting at all. When you read the lucid thoughts of a teenager below, are you able to paint yourself a picture of anything? Does it outline any sort of character for you? Or is it all just completely nonsensical?

I understand most of what is below on some level, whether because I’m familiar with the cultural references I make, or because some of it just makes sense on its own (i.e. the part about Irish girls). But do you? Please send me a message or let me know in the comments how you respond to this – I’m quite curious!

In the mean time, I hope you enjoy the free-flowing thoughts of a 17-year-old high school student in a creative writing class:

The free-flowing thought of a 17-year-old. What I wouldn’t give to know what music was playing during this writing exercise…

Transcript:

SuikodenCaptain, making fun of SuikodenFinal Fantasy 6 operaCeles, Setzer, Gau, Terra,Locke Edgar, Strago, RelmStrago / Relm / Shadow connection?Why is the tape so quiet thenso loud? Crappy player?Is it the school’s or the teacher’s?Want to practice withAll-City Musical OrchestraWhat the hell is this from?It’s not very goodAlmost sounds Irish, only badBrynn’s IrishI LIKE Irish girlsNow it REALLY sounds IrishI want to marry an Irish girl – probably aredheadI hate Captain’s watchWhy did that just cut off?What the hell (once again)It WAS like Ty CobbThis is like Linkin’ ParkNice saxophone, nice beatCool band, I like itI need to ask what this isWho was that womansinging?I bet she wasn’t IrishThis sounds like somethingoff of a soundtrackSpecifically, Lord of the RingsGosh that movie suckedWar, blood, violenceI never think the IMAGEof blood, I usually picturegrey swords clanging together.This is from the 20’sI wish I was in loveI kind of AM in love, but inan ambivalent, restrainedkind of wayI knew that would endright thereThis HARDCORE soundslike Final FantasyThat one song… either “WeThree Kings of Orient Are” or“Tuxedo Kamen Piano Suite”from Sailor MoonReally sounds like 3 kingsToo bad that had to endSecret of Mana timeVery nice… wish I was moreproficient at the pianoIt stopped“Creative juices” made methink of sex right away

The only things I’ll point out are that “Captain” is the name of my best friend, who took the class with me, and Brynn is the name of another close [always platonic] friend who sat next to me in that class. Their names will come up several times in the future, I’m sure, so you may as well be aware of their existence now.

Please let me know whether this is all completely meaningless to you, or if disjointed personal writing like this sparks something in your imagination! I feel that so many things online today are cut-and-dry, spelled out for you, and not really open to interpretation. I want to know if I’m adding something deeper, or if I’m just adding nonsense to the noise. And please feel free to share with friends if you think any of them would like to add their thoughts!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/27/free-flowing-thoughts-of-a-17-year-old-high-school-senior/feed/0codygoughThe free-flowing thought of a 17-year-old. What I wouldn't give to know what music was playing during this writing exercise...My high school persona and student-teacher relationshipshttps://codygough.com/2013/01/26/my-high-school-persona-and-student-teacher-relationships-on-aim/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/26/my-high-school-persona-and-student-teacher-relationships-on-aim/#respondSat, 26 Jan 2013 17:13:59 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=568I already mentioned when I posted my letter to my creative writing teacher that she was previously my English teacher during my sophomore year of high school. I found an AIM conversation – that’s AOL Instant Messenger, for those of you born five years after me – that I think will help elucidate my relationship with her (as well as my high school persona) even further.

Talking to students online wasn’t exactly the norm back then, but she was a more young, cutting-edge teacher, and frankly I thought her willingness to be available to students was commendable. By the time you finish reading this conversation, however, I’m afraid you may understand why more teachers prefer not to be messaged while at home.

Don’t worry: despite this seemingly infuriating conversation from my sophomore year, I’m currently Facebook friends with her, and we got along quite swimmingly my senior year of high school (somehow).

I won’t follow this conversation with any thoughts, because frankly, it speaks for itself (and by “speaks for itself,” I mean “is hilarious on its own”). So enjoy!

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This blog entry is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

In addition to having read The Iliad, The Odyssey, most of Plato’s The Republic, and several other scholarly works by my sophomore year of high school, we delved into advanced literary criticism at the beginning of my senior year of A.P. English Literature. Here is one particular excerpt from my notes from my first semester of my senior year that stood out to me:

Be sure to pay attention to the “Good day in Dimmesdale’s life” section

Highlights (Italics added):

Chillingworth starts to talk about sex, beats himself into an orgasm

Both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale exist in an S&M relationship

Beat yourself to get released from the beating

Frankly, I remember virtually nothing from A Scarlet Letter (who does?!), but it certainly was important that we talked in class about people beating themselves into an orgasm. Was that seriously part of the book? I somehow doubt it, but we sure interpreted it that way!

My classmates and I were handling very adult material by the time we were 15 (I took these particular notes when I was 17), so it’s not like the nonsensical scribbling in my idea notebook are indicative of my educational background; on the contrary, they are indicative of someone who had chosen to neglect to utilize that educational background, instead focusing on the pursuit of irreverence and… wow, this sentence has a lot of vocabulary words in it, maybe I should just keep extending it in an attempt to exacerbate the illusion of SHOOT I CAN’T THINK OF ANY MORE BIG WORDS, IT APPEARS THAT ALL GOOD THINGS MUST INDEED COME TO AN END.

**UPDATE: In an extremely bizarre turn of events, it was just brought to my attention that The Onion posted a satirical piece about The Scarlet Letter only two days ago. I guess great minds think alike! And so, apparently, do The Onion and I.

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This blog entry is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/25/background-on-the-rockford-auburn-high-school-academy-education-circa-2003/feed/0codygoughBe sure to pay attention to the "Good day in Dimmesdale's life" sectionFuturistic poem of the futurehttps://codygough.com/2013/01/23/futuristic-poem-of-the-future-of-bad-poetry/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/23/futuristic-poem-of-the-future-of-bad-poetry/#respondWed, 23 Jan 2013 23:05:42 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=559My first poem of my creative writing class! This should be exciting. Let’s see what I came up with ten years ago today:

Futuristic poem is futuristic

Transcript:Watching the grey cat crap,
I pick you up and jump over it,
Taking you across the creek to enjoy
The liquid in the plastic cup awaiting us
In the futuristic house
In the futuristic world
In our futuristic lives
…..of the future.

A few things:

What. The hell. Is this.

I legitimately never drank alcohol in high school, so I’m assuming the plastic cup contains Mountain Dew. In fact, I am positive this absolutely has to be the case.

This “poem” is the kind of thing that makes me wonder where thoughts come from. And somehow, I don’t even care that I ended that sentence with a preposition.

I don’t have any record of what assignment spawned this obviously brilliant poem, so I won’t be writing a “modern-day version” of the assignment this time. Let’s hope things stay this ridiculous in the future!

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This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/23/futuristic-poem-of-the-future-of-bad-poetry/feed/0codygoughFuturistic poem is futuristicHow I’m like my shoehttps://codygough.com/2013/01/22/creative-writing-about-how-i-am-like-my-shoe/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/22/creative-writing-about-how-i-am-like-my-shoe/#commentsWed, 23 Jan 2013 02:46:53 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=551My first creative writing assignment: write about how I am similar to my shoe. Okay, easy enough, right? Here’s what I came up with ten years ago today:

This is how I’m like my shoe. How are you like your shoe?

Transcript:“I’m like my shoe because we’re both afraid of spiders, tripping, and werewolves. My shoe is very old and thus could become a BED TIME SNACK for spiders, and I’m REALLY scared of spiders, and of bugs in general. Also, I hate tripping on things or accidentally kicking hard objects and ending up in pain. Also, werewolves are really freaky and violent and fight like girls. FOR NO REASON.”

A few things:

I don’t know how old shoes can become a “BED TIME SNACK” (why was that in all caps??) for spiders, but that line still makes me laugh.

I’m still really afraid of bugs, but centipedes scare me much, much more than spiders ever have. Boxelder bugs also scare me out of my mind.

To clarify: werewolves fight like girls because they kick and bite and scratch, which boys generally don’t do. Sorry, ladies, but you can’t call science sexist.

I don’t have much more to say, so now comes the hard part: I will try to describe how I’m like my shoe today. I wish I had attempted this before reading my original response from ten years ago, but I can’t do anything about that now. So here is my 2013 explanation of how I’m like my shoe:

I’m like my shoe because we’re both comfortable, we both age well, and we both have spring in our step. My New Balance shoes are comfortable, and the word “Cody” literally means “cushion,” which is what I feel like the soles of my feet are stepping on while I walk. We both age well, probably because my shoes avoid the rain and I avoid the sun. I also like to walk with a little bit of swagger, which my shoes also do as they spring my feet back up with that classic cushioning. This is the part where I’d love New Balance to pay me large sums of money for my ringing endorsement. Although to be completely honest, I haven’t purchased a pair of shoes other than New Balance shoes since my sophomore year of college, which was nearly ten years ago. They’re just, like, the best shoe brand ever. I think I got off topic, but let’s face it: blog posts that stay completely on topic can become a BED TIME SNACK for spiders.

…some things never change.

—This blog entry is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/22/creative-writing-about-how-i-am-like-my-shoe/feed/1codygoughThis is how I'm like a shoe. How are you like a shoe?A letter to my creative writing teacherhttps://codygough.com/2013/01/21/a-letter-to-my-high-school-creative-writing-teacher/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/21/a-letter-to-my-high-school-creative-writing-teacher/#commentsTue, 22 Jan 2013 02:22:24 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=527On the first day of my last semester of high school, our creative writing class was tasked with writing a letter to our teacher – who also happened to be my sophomore English teacher – outlining our expectations of the class. Here is that letter, complete with the teacher’s notes, followed by a transcript with her comments in bold:

A letter to my creative writing teacher (formerly my sophomore English teacher) on my first day of my final semester of high school.

Dear Teacher:

Well since the English curriculum in school generally hasn’t involved any creative, fictional, non-objective, or otherwise fun writing whatsoever, and I RUN a role-playing game on message boards online which involves constant original fantasy writing, I hoped to gain some semblance of an idea of how to write and/or whether or not I’m even any good at writing fiction at all. Also, are you really going to read this? [Yes, Cody I’m reading this.] I bet you are. I’m going to give you a really hard time if you don’t, though. Actually, that would just make me a difficult student [Who you?], and I don’t want to be particularly difficult this semester. This class is gonna rock – and I can buy coffee and creme [sic] and hot chocolate mix for you too [Well, I thought I’d institute the “Elvis Slush fund”], since I did in Speech class last semester anyway. Food RULES. So does this class. No, seriously. [Well, I hope you have a good semester. I’m glad you’re in the class. Where’s Gohan been?]

Sincerely,Cody Gough

A few things:

I didn’t really start drinking coffee until partway through college, so I have no idea where the “coffee and creme” reference originated, nor do I have any recollection of an “Elvis Slush fund.” I guess you forget some random small details after 10 years!

In contrast to the Elvis reference, I actually do understand the Gohan reference, but I will explain that long story in a future post.

This is actually the second time I’d asked my teacher in my class notes whether she was actually reading them; my first time doing this was as a student in her English class my sophomore year of high school. To put that in context, though, I really wasn’t being a jerk, because I actually quite liked her classes, and pretty much everything I did (and still do) is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Believe me, I’ve inspired a lot of eye-rolling from my teachers over the years.

Instead of ending the last sentence with a period, I nearly ended it with a smiley face emoticon. As a direct result, I am now wallowing in self-loathing.

This letter pretty much sets the tone for my 10-year Idea Reunion. At the time I wrote this, I had written a lot, but had no idea whether the writing was any “good,” I got along with my teacher well enough to be allowed a certain level of irreverence, and I was excited about the idea of finding new creative ways to express myself.

I hate shameless self-plugs, but if you’re interested in following my journey through this class, then please follow me via WordPress! It’s going to be a long – and hopefully very entertaining – journey.

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/21/a-letter-to-my-high-school-creative-writing-teacher/feed/1codygoughA letter to my creative writing teacher (formerly my sophomore English teacher) on my first day of my final semester of high school.My 10-Year Idea Reunionhttps://codygough.com/2013/01/16/my-10-year-creative-idea-reunion/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/16/my-10-year-creative-idea-reunion/#commentsThu, 17 Jan 2013 03:01:37 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=521The time is nigh.

It’s like my own personal Bible… of IDEAS

I took a creative writing class during my last semester of high school in 2003, and I still have the “idea notebook” I created while enrolled in that class. Our first day of class was January 21, 2003. Guess what day is coming up soon?

That’s right: January 21, 2013.

Over the next several months, I will be reproducing the contents of my “idea notebook” in their ENTIRETY on this site. All of my poems, stories, notes, and more will be here…exactly 10 years after I wrote them.

I want to be clear up-front that the humor contained in these posts will not come from the sheer awfulness of any of it. Quite the contrary: I consider myself to be a pretty funny teenager, and from what I’ve seen flipping through the pages of my tome of brilliance, I was a pretty funny teenager 10 years ago, too. I didn’t – and still don’t – take myself too seriously, so everything you read will have more than a slight dose of irreverence.

And I won’t just be regurgitating old content; after all, where’s the challenge in that? Instead, in addition to writing commentary on my old treasures, I will also re-do some of my old assignments and compare them to what I wrote 10 years ago. We’ll all find out together how much I’ve changed in the last decade.

Stay tuned. This is going to be fun.

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/16/my-10-year-creative-idea-reunion/feed/1codygoughIt's like my own personal Bible... of IDEAShttps://codygough.com/2013/01/08/when-spoilers-arent-bad-in-game-of-thrones/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/08/when-spoilers-arent-bad-in-game-of-thrones/#respondWed, 09 Jan 2013 02:08:17 +0000http://codygough.com/2013/01/08/414/I read Game of Thrones before I saw the show, which made the show more predictable. My friend, however, saw the show and is now reading the books, and I imagine it’s a lot easier to keep track of the characters since she’d seen them physically interact before. Pick your poison!
]]>https://codygough.com/2013/01/08/when-spoilers-arent-bad-in-game-of-thrones/feed/0codygoughWhy I may never pass on my parental wisdomhttps://codygough.com/2012/12/29/why-i-may-never-pass-on-my-parental-wisdom/
https://codygough.com/2012/12/29/why-i-may-never-pass-on-my-parental-wisdom/#respondSun, 30 Dec 2012 04:51:08 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=177Why I may never pass on my parental wisdom.
]]>https://codygough.com/2012/12/29/why-i-may-never-pass-on-my-parental-wisdom/feed/0codygoughEnglish ASSignmenthttps://codygough.com/2012/12/17/english-assignment/
https://codygough.com/2012/12/17/english-assignment/#respondMon, 17 Dec 2012 22:44:13 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=80